Yes, this is real, and not a Saturday Night Live sketch. I saw it with my own eyes, and then proceeded immediately to an emergency chemical wash station. Actually, scratch that… it’s brilliant in its own way. I can admit that. I admire the mind that conceived it and the oral persuasion that went into getting a client to pay (presumably top dollar) for it. I just don’t know about the target audience. I mean, who digs jean shorts, let alone mock-denim diapers? Outside of Kentucky, I mean.
To try to completely distill filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s sprawling sci-fi chessboard action-drama on the fly and in short-form would be something of a fool’s game, so a longer review will likely follow, in some form, somewhere, but suffice it to say that an admiration and understanding of the mind-bending Inception rests largely in one’s appreciation for and tolerance of the idea of esoteric feeling fueling an action film rather than merely corporeal concerns.
Still plagued by the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), freelance corporate espionage agent Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) extracts ideas from dreams, tilling his victims’ subconscious for valuable information. Busted by a businessman (Ken Watanabe) who offers him a chance for amnesty by planting an idea deep in the mind of his ascendant rival (Cillian Murphy), Dom and his team plunge deep into a multi-layered dreamscape.
Rangy and intellectually muscular, Inception is flawed in the ways that only a brilliant, overreaching work can be. While almost always involving, it doesn’t have a suitably engaging antagonist, and its grander emotional strokes don’t quite pack the emotional wallop Nolan thinks they do, mainly because Mal remains a cipher, a placeholder of peaceable tranquility rather than a full-blooded character.
What’s most heartening and invigorating, though, is the sheer, staggering theoretical and philosophical ambition on display, and the amount of studio muscle and capital thrown at it, when pablum is so often Hollywood’s default setting. At its core, Inception is a rumination on the very human and appealing idea of utter stability, and arrested happiness. For plenty of film geeks, that will be achieved this summer. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 148 minutes)
Inbred Redneck Vampires has exactly one thing going for it, in the form of its DVD cover, in which a “tramp stamp” Confederate flag tattoo rises alluringly over a pair of jeans, blood trickling down the bare back of its cover model. Unfortunately not even this potentially lucrative one-sheet image is clearly rendered; it’s awash in muddy grey, which is a telling metaphor for the across-the-board failure of what could otherwise be a stupid-fun romp through an exploitative, made-for-video premise.
A micro-budgeted, schlocky 2004 comedy only now receiving a home video
release, the provocatively titled Inbred Redneck Vampires finds sexy vampire Catherine (Felicia Pandolfi) and her lackey/underling Lendel (Werewolf Tales‘ Warren E.B.B., impressively preserving the anonymity of three-quarters of his name) on the run from a ruthless vampire hunter. After stumbling across Billy Joe Barney Bob (Robert Olin), they take refuge in the small rural burgh of Backwash, where Catherine hatches a plan to turn the backwoods folk into an army of vampire slaves. Beer drinking, bean eating, tripe cooking, shower peeping (above), competitive farting, terrible puns, and all other manner of forced line readings and sigh-inducing inanity ensue, leading up to the town’s annual Tripe Days Festival.
The back of the DVD cover box touts the movie as “combining the gross-out and physical comedy of Animal House and American Pie with the country humor of Hee Haw,” but that’s sort of akin to saying Fear Dot Com shares a lot in common with The Exorcist since they’re both horror films. Director and co-writer Joe Sherlock may be a veteran of over two dozen independent features and anthologies, but his work here doesn’t even have any sleazy sexploitation value for avowed fans of off-the-beaten-path regional video. (The movie was shot in Washington and Oregon, with a cast of largely local non-professionals.)
A lot can be forgiven by way of shoddy technical execution if there’s just a little pop to the material — some snarky fun to be had in the tangled weeds of the dialogue, or a performance that’s wild, zonked and/or enjoyably amusing. Inbred Redneck Vampires simply doesn’t have any of those things going for it, however. (There is a dwarf [also above, leering], if that matters to anyone.) The set-ups are mostly flat, the framing and camerawork is atrocious, the performances uniformly cringe-inducing (broad, without benefit of a backdrop and pacing that tonally matches), and the nature of the material unsettled and very much up in the air. Don’t judge a book by its cover, they say. The same applies to shlocky B-movies, if anyone needed a reminder.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Inbred Redneck Vampires comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen, divided into 29 chapters, with an English language stereo audio track. Bonus material arrives by way of 10 minutes worth of bloopers (in which tubby guys reveal some man-cleavage and one gal mock-fellates a microphone), a trailer for the movie, and an 11-minute behind-the-scenes featurette, which reveals the movie’s original title as Bloodsucking Redneck Vampires, and spotlights the nature of DIY indie film production, by way of a wardrobe story involving a panicked run to the nearest Target, one town away. There are nine trailers for other Sub Rosa Studios releases, too, including for movies entitled Ski Wolf and, ahem, Terror at Blood Fart Lake (yes, seriously). A braver critic would have perhaps given due diligence and investigated the latter; I skipped it, alas. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. F (Movie) C- (Disc)