I decided to close out the Nightstream Film Festival's final day with two of its more comedic offerings. The first one wasn't even a horror movie, but a gritty, punk rock romantic black comedy, while the second was a wild thriller that had a bit too many different stories going on at once but still managed to impress.
To start...
Dinner in America (2020)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
Dinner in America, the lone non-horror film that I watched at Nightstream, turned out to be one of the highlights of the festival. At its heart, it's a "manic pixie dream girl" indie rom-com with the genders reversed (and a whole lot more sex and cursing), in which a young woman who feels like she's going nowhere falls for a rebellious, edgy musician and petty crook who shakes up her life and encourages her to live on the wild side. And watching this movie, that's kind of what I wanted to do, thanks to this movie's blend of dark humor, punk rock sensibilities, and a surprising amount of earnestness, all brought together by a great cast led by Kyle Gallner and Emily Skeggs. It was honest about the kinds of people that its main characters were and refused to sugarcoat them, but rather than just going the Natural Born Killers route and making a movie about awful people doing awful things, it instead lent them a sense of flawed humanity that got me invested in their journey even if they weren't necessarily sympathetic. This is definitely one to keep an eye on for anyone looking for an offbeat, very dark romance.
Simon is the frontman of a punk rock band called the Psy-Ops under the alias John Q. Public, one who lives on the wrong side of the law and the edge of poverty; we're introduced to him taking part in medical experiments to pay the bills. After a meeting with a would-be girlfriend's family goes horribly wrong and ends with him setting their house on fire and a $5,000 bounty on his head, he finds himself on the run from the law. Here, he encounters Patty, a nerdy 20-year-old woman who works at a pet shop and seems to have given up on her dreams. Unbeknownst to the both of them, the seemingly straight-laced Patty is in fact the one sending "John Q. Public" naughty Polaroid pictures of herself masturbating. Taking Patty under his wing, Simon teaches her to be a bit more aggressive, whether that's telling her boss to shove it, taking on a pair of high school bullies who still give her grief, and simply letting her hair down and learning how to live. Simon can't outrun the law forever, though, and he has some secrets of his own.
The moment I started watching this film, I could tell immediately that it was set in the Midwest. Between its mix of cornball suburbia where Patty lives and the generally depressed, run-down atmosphere of the circles that Simon lives in, even before it was specified that the film took place in Michigan I could simply feel an unmistakably Middle American atmosphere billowing in, specifically the unflattering kind often deployed by filmmakers who grew up there and hated it: a land of ennui and stagnation in which the only release is to go off the beaten track. It is reflected in the lives of both Patty, who dropped out of community college and whose life is going nowhere, and Simon, a burnout who, without spoiling anything, squandered every advantage he ever had. At first glance, the abrasive, foul-mouthed punk and the straight-laced dork seemingly have nothing in common, but once they meet, their chemistry is undeniable. Kyle Gallner and Emily Skeggs together make up the heart and soul of this movie as Simon and Patty. Gallner comes across as a rough-hewn asshole who has in many ways dug himself into the hole he's in, but not an altogether irredeemable figure, and somebody who has his own sense of what is right and wrong even if it doesn't exactly sync up with that of the rest of society. Skeggs, meanwhile, felt like somebody who was quietly growing fed up with her dead-end life, seeking any rebellion she could but otherwise too meek to really stand up for herself. The way Patty's relationship with Simon played out felt like a reversal of what Nathan Rabin called the "manic pixie dream girl" romantic story, in which the stuffy male lead has his life turned upside down by his quirky new girlfriend who teaches him how to live. The difference, of course, is that Patty herself has something to teach Simon as well, particularly when it comes to his nihilistic outlook on life and the various mistakes he made. A late-in-the-game revelation concerning Simon's background recontextualized a lot of things about who he was and why he did what he did, in some ways making him come off even worse than he did before while showing why a relationship like his and Patty's probably would not work out.
The meat of the film, and the source of most of its biggest laughs, comes with Simon's antics around town and how he involves Patty in them. This movie fully indulges in Simon and Patty being crude and mean-spirited to the people they doesn't like, from jocks to mean girls to asshole bosses, and as the film progresses, we feel Patty's growing sense of catharsis as she finally tells the world around her where to shove it. It felt like a dangerous ride into an unsafe world, one in which you're there to have a blast and enjoy yourself at the expense of some of society's... well, not its worst, but certainly its most annoying. That does include Simon, who we're introduced to making out with his girlfriend's mom and getting caught by the dad, and whose hard-ass punk persona is revealed to be at least partially an act, giving off the sense that his use of an alias and a mask while playing with his band isn't so much about hiding his identity from the law (at least, not entirely) as it is about hiding his embarrassing past from people who would dismiss him as a poser if they knew about it. It's a very bleak kind of comedy full of broken people, but at the same time, it manages to convey this tone without turning outright cynical, ultimately ending by showing us a way forward for Patty and the possibility of a better life.
The Bottom Line
Dinner in America, the lone non-horror film I watched at the Nightstream Film Festival, was a riot. A dark comedy that manages to maintain its humanity without turning spiteful, I highly recommend keeping an eye on it.
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Second movie of the night was one last return to the horror well, this time in the form of an extremely violent horror-comedy.
Bloody Hell (2020)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Bloody Hell was an extremely unwieldy movie that had two, maybe three seemingly unrelated plots going on at once, a mashup of every cool action and horror movie idea that writer Robert Benjamin and director Alister Grierson seemed to have and only token effort made to combine them into a coherent whole. And yet, I was still enthralled by its mix of lighthearted humor, a pair of very dark storylines, and a very likable lead performance from Ben O'Toole. It was a very shallow and dumb movie, but it hit the spot and ended the Nightstream Film Festival on a reasonably high note.
Our protagonist Rex Coen is a former soldier in Boise, Idaho who, during a bank robbery, fought back against the robbers in an incident that made him a celebrity when security camera footage from it went viral. Unfortunately, since the incident ended in tragedy, society was deeply split between those who thought he was a hero and those who thought he was a psycho, and his recklessness led to eight years in prison. Now, having just been released, he decides to leave the country and start a new life in distant Finland where nobody will recognize him. Once he gets there, however, fate has other plans, as he is kidnapped and wakes up in a basement with his right leg having been cut off at the knee. His captors are a family raising an inhuman son who can only eat human flesh, and they keep him fed by kidnapping tourists and travelers. With the help of their beautiful daughter Alia, the token good one among them, and the voice in his head, Rex plans his escape.
There were two very good horror-comedies that could've been made here. The first one strictly concerns Rex and ignores what happens to him in Finland, focusing on him rebuilding his life while constantly arguing with the "wacky" voice in his head that led him to do what he did in that bank -- a voice that may just be his conscience speaking, or may be something more malevolent. Alternatively, Rex could have had a more conventional backstory and the film could've just been about him getting kidnapped by cannibals in Finland. The problem with the film is that it tries to be both of these things, and yet it never finds a way to tie them together. Rex's backstory takes up a very large portion of the film, and yet it never serves much of a real purpose, feeling like so much extraneous fluff as the things he did never really come up during his time in Finland beyond a few mentions. Likewise, the voice that Rex speaks to throughout the film, represented as a slicker version of him wearing a leather jacket and standing around, is only really important to the film insofar as it lends ambiguity to what he did during the bank robbery, raising the possibility that he might be insane or even possessed -- an idea that the film never explores, with him existing seemingly almost entirely to give Rex someone to talk to when he's alone. The film's stories felt disconnected from one another, and so the shift between them was jarring, almost as though it turned into a completely different movie. A good idea to connect them would have been if, instead of cannibalism, the evil Finns who kidnap Rex were into hunting the most dangerous game, and they saw him as a worthy foe who would provide them a serious challenge -- all while the experience puts him back into the mindset he had in the bank, complete with questions of his mental state coming to the fore as he hunts them down.
As it stood, however, while the film's plot was an utter mess, its atmosphere was remarkably consistent, helping to paper over a lot of its very large cracks. Ben O'Toole was great playing what are basically two different characters, the straight man Rex and his more outrageous inner voice, and while you can tell that the two are connected, you also get the sense that Rex has a part of himself that he wants to keep under wraps. A third-act scene where he puts his various skills to use demonstrates just how tough he really is even despite missing a leg, and his banter with both Alia and his inner voice provided lots of dark humor. Overall, it was a film where the plot didn't really seem to matter much for my enjoyment, as it still managed to feel like a cohesive film even though the structure was out of whack. It may have felt like two different movies welded together, but they were two movies that had similar tones and were clearly made by the same filmmakers. And from start to finish, I was entertained.
The Bottom Line
Bloody Hell is a movie that shouldn't work as well as it did on account of its deeply flawed structure, but it worked anyway as the sort of movie you turn on to have a good time, laugh, and not really care about the story. Check it out.
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