I Blame Society (2020)

I don't blame society. I blame Gillian Wallace Horvat. And that's my review done. 

Okay, I guess I should say a bit more.

Gillian Wallace Horvat plays a struggling filmmaker (named Gillian), who is also having a hard time with a friend, Chase (played by Chase Williamson). She starts to plan murders, having been told that she could be very good at it, and then puts them together into a film she hopes will impress those who can help her career.

It's hard to think of where to really begin with my full review of I Blame Society, mainly because there are lots of separate little moments that at least made me smile. It's a bad film though, weighed down by the ridiculousness of a central concept that it never really knows how best to handle. I've seen a lot of people giving this a fair bit of praise, which surprised me once I'd finally seen it for myself.

First of all, Horvat is a great talent. Her filmography is full of some interesting celebrations of different movies (her video documentary shorts cover films as diverse as American Ninja and The Bells Of St. Mary's, as well as some looking at Frank Capra, Cary Grant, and others . . . I assume these are pieces that have been packaged with various features given upgraded shiny disc releases). Horvat is clearly a big film fan, and has decided to try something that can call out, and make use of, the limitations of low-budget, independent, cinema. It just didn't work for me.

The two main problems are the script, co-written by Horvat and Williamson, and the central performance. Try as she might, I just don't think Horvat felt right in the lead role. It all feels like acting throughout, whereas the whole thing could have been better if there was someone who was able to convincingly portray that detached coldness needed for most of the small set-pieces that occur.

Although I can't say just how much effort went into this, and most films take a hell of a lot of effort just to get made, there's also a feeling that everyone involved took the easiest options. A pet peeve of mine is when mockumentaries and/or "found footage" films have lead characters who are just given the same name of the actors. I know it's often used to blur the lines between fact and fiction, and allow for some more spontaneous magic to happen, but it always feels lazy to me. Then you have the supporting cast that are just dragged in and out of the loose storyline when required, none of them really given any time or space to feel like a potentially real person. And the ending is just a culmination of the ridiculousness that keeps being piled on throughout the second half.

You can blame society. You can blame others close to you. But don't blame me if you watch this and end up disliking it. The humour saves it, but there's not enough of it to make it something I would even rate as average.

4/10

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Shudder Saturday: Sequence Break (2017)

It is probably my own fault. I may have brought along some unfairly high expectations when I sat down to view Sequence Break, written and directed by the very likable Graham Skipper. I was rooting for Skipper, and I had heard people make shorthand comments comparing it to some murky hybrid of Tron and Cronenbergian horror. How could it fail?

Chase Williamson plays Oz, a young man who works on many arcade machines, getting them back in working order for his boss (Lyle Kanouse). Unfortunately, he is about to lose his job. His place of employment is no longer making money, times are hard. The good news is that he meets a young woman, Tess (Fabianne Therese), and a date looks very likely in his near future. He heads back to his work, finds an envelope with a motherboard stashed inside, and when he places that motherboard inside a game cabinet things start to get weird.

Written and directed by Skipper, Sequence Break is an odd film that deliberately blurs the lines of the onscreen reality until things are almost impenetrable, and then decides to use the very last moments to turn things back to a more traditional film style. It's quite the paradox, being both experimental and daring and yet also surprisingly safe. It's a film full of impressive small details that can never push everything together to make a satisfying big picture. The low budget is obvious in every scene but just a bit more creativity and madness could have distracted viewers from it.

Williamson is a solid lead, Therese is just as good alongside him, Kanouse does fine, and John Dinan pops up occasionally to be the mysterious man who knows about the situation well enough to provide oblique hints regarding how to resolve things. None of the main cast members are bad, which helps the film immensely because they're not given much to work with. The film is more concerned with the idea of the machine, the way it affects the mind and what else it may cause to happen, but it doesn't even explore that central stand as fully or effectively as it could. As the runtime is only 80 minutes, this is something that could have been improved upon throughout most of the second and third acts.

Skipper, perhaps tellingly, does better in the scenes that just have characters talking to one another. He clearly makes an effort to let the acting be the focus of dialogue-heavy scenes. Which makes it a shame that most of the film is taken up with characters gazing at, and being gazed back by, the machine.

But hey, I've seen a lot of people praise this, a lot of people liked it more than I did. I could be wrong in my view. It happens (rarely). So you may want to give it a go for yourself and see what you think. Just don't take any notice of anyone trying to compare it to other, better, films.

4/10

You can buy the DVD here.
Americans can stream the movie.