The story of how it is dangerous to preach Christ in the American backwaters
The American hinterland - it is not loved and feared by the Americans themselves - is teeming with scumbags. Many wonderful pictures were shot about it, it entered the history of American cinema as a place where someone runs with a chainsaw. And God forbid a New Yorker to come in, there is no way out alive. However, no self-respecting citizen will ever go there.
What if you have to go there on a religious mission? This need arose from two Christian girls who went to the wilderness to preach Christ. Christ Himself, according to the Gospels, after his carnal death preached to all scumbags languishing in hell. But it was Christ, and here are two innocent creatures clutching the hands of the Bible and piously believing that the word of God is able to appease and make any scum repent. Oh, the girls were wrong!
The idea in principle is not bad and not so intrusive. And in a film with such an odious title, there is even a certain philosophy. Girls really pity, and willy-nilly even justify the actions of the main character, one night showed us how the word of God can be turned into a knife that should be plunged into the ass of a notorious sinner, not in order to cause active repentance, but for fierce revenge. Jesus told us to turn the other cheek of the offender. No revenge, in a word. And what if the soul was shaken, if they encroached on the most secret - virgin innocence. What if the bride of Christ herself was cruelly treated? How can you not take revenge?
A film with an interesting idea, but without an original plot, is more like a black comedy. All actions and actions of the characters are predictable, recognizable and template. The only thing that sets this film apart from Friday 13 slashers and Texas chainsaws is the idea. We are not going on a long journey stupid, in the head of which only alcohol and fuck-drums, and quite decent girls, with whom so badly treated. And here revenge is appropriate, here the bloody feast was arranged by the surviving girl, turned, it seemed, by God himself into an instrument of revenge.
D. Guzman played a very remarkable idea of the struggle of transcendental Good and Light with a very real, earthly Evil. He played at ease, apparently not intending to return to this idea. And the viewer decided not to load much. The result was a crime drama with a predictable outcome.
This movie caught my eye in a rather strange way. I was looking for a video for adults, and I fell from here! Now you know what this movie is? It's clear to me. Of course, I took it to my pencil.
And so, when the tooth-crushing fiction I got sick of pain in the liver, I decided to get to this work.
I'll only talk about the story in passing. Because it's like those typical thrillers. When the main characters go wrong. And the same thing happened here. These are two students of the Catholic Church. We went to sell the Bible and wandered into the wilderness, where the hotbed of sin. And they have already snatched up greedy to animal passion scoundrels.
How do I see this movie? It started out very intriguingly. With fervor and glitter in his eyes. He is the one who gives us everything on the stage. He is led by a long-haired man named Wolf. One of the maidens, who had recently served God, is on the path of blood. Revenges her abuse. And that's when it started... Well, somehow the film itself got bored. True, the scenes of the massacre returned everything to normal.
Personally, I liked this film more than the publicized “I spit on your graves”, where the canvas is the same. What's the effect here? I don't know. "Run, bitch, run!" More animal than that. You know, anything can happen in a picture like this. It literally does not follow any of the templates (well, except for those templates that thrillers can follow).
Of course it's thrash. Of course, blood. But I already knew what I was signing up for. But I can't put an extra high score either.
Among all genres and subgenres of exploitative cinema, the greatest survivability due to its extreme versatility and to this day retains revenge film, as well as slightly sprouted from it into a separate genre branch of rape & revenge, fermented on sulfur-acid yeast core sexploitation and Rednek hixploitation with non-trivial elements of rampant sadistic porn. And somehow it is completely forgotten that the cinema of revenge would have been simply impossible without the “Maiden Source” of the Swedish poet of non-communicability Ingmar Bergman, who not only created the skeleton of the future genre, but also built on it the flesh of the main genre traits, which in turn were rushed to use and Sam Peckinpah in his “Straw Dogs”, the first to transfer the idea of righteous retribution with pernicious consequences for the avenger himself to American soil with its root myths of the single hero, and Michael Winner in “Zhendezhdezhda” where this image was still more significant in the essence. But only in the exploitative cinematography, formed in the midst of the sexual revolution and the wild rampage of peace-loving lustful “children of flowers”, all sorts of Meira Zarka, Lee Frost and Russa Meyer with unprecedented enthusiasm and furious pleasure began to tear pieces of flesh from the ever-memorable densely dramatic skeleton of Bergman, replacing and substituting for their own discretion the asceticism, symbolism and psychology of it with physiology, naturalism and nihilism, and focusing more on the latter. The denial not only of the Criminal Code, but also of any norms, frameworks and restraining factors has become, perhaps, the main feature of not only the seven-costal-eight-costal revenge movie, but also the modern one, which has managed to oxidize in postmodernism and rot in realism.
From the directorial debut of Joseph Guzman, the pinnacle of his early cinematic career was the carbon monochrome short film “Clown Chingsaud” in 2006, the film with the too eloquent title “Run, Bitch, Run!” in 2009, alas, from the very beginning, it blows not so much nostalgia for the old-good unprincipled old school, as it is a peremptory option. Perceived as a natural homage and “Woman’s Day” by Zarka, and “Last House on the Left” by Craven, and almost the whole “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, cheerfully riding the erotic dialectics of Russ Meyer, this twenty-five thousand on the total budget expenditures of the film product seems to be no more than an ideal thrash for the sake of thrash, in which everything is expected to be reduced to anal sodomy with prickly-cutting objects, universal misogyny, reincarnating in a series of surgical chaos, after the totarchy. Moreover, the honorable director, who managed to reach the desired camera and its handle, in order to subsequently bring the audience to the handle with his cinematic handiwork, does not think much about the clarity and logic of his narrative, with pornographic succession demonstrating the most vulgar acts and the cruel tortures that accompany them, but at the same time not observing measures.
Undoubtedly, Joseph Guzman clearly understands the numerous grindhouse genre coordinates, in "Run, bitch, run!" without interfering with the fact that it is impossible to mix in principle into indigestible porridge at the output, but this hardly justifies the excessive incoherence of the obtained cinnabar. The film seems so excessive, suffocating-bloody and grotesque-cruel that this excessiveness progressively to the final becomes its only plus, while even any little bit of artisanal cinematography in the epic-apoplexy and cathartic-hysterical finale of "Run, bitch, run!" becomes a total anti-cinematography, and in the tape everything becomes so bad that it is already good. Blood and silicone are successfully trampled into the concrete of an unrestrained bloodthirsty carnival, while Guzman himself does not even seek to follow the beaten path of Tarantino and Rodriguez or the worst end of Jason Eisener, completely saturating his film with neither postmodern allusions, nor synephilic preludes, nor acutely social critical illusions, fascinated not so much by sophisticated stylization as by its perverted likeness. A caricature of naturalness. Caricature almost in the style of “Charlie Hebdo”, only this time under the crosshairs of the virgin servants of Jesus, with one stroke of a machete and a stroke of a strained phallus turned into no longer believing in anything and anyone blindingly bloody bitches, who at the end of their greedy revenge can only run, burning crosses with crucifixes and bridges over Madison County with curses. God will not save them and Satan will not help them.
Among all genres and subgenres of exploitative cinema, the greatest survivability due to its extreme versatility and to this day retains revenge film, as well as slightly sprouted from it into a separate genre branch of rape & revenge, fermented on sulfur-acid yeast core sexploitation and Rednek hixploittaion with non-trivial elements of rampant sadistic porn. And somehow it is completely forgotten that the cinema of revenge would have been simply impossible without the “Maiden Source” of the Swedish poet of non-communicability Ingmar Bergman, who not only created the skeleton of the future genre, but also built on it the flesh of the main genre traits, which in turn were rushed to use and Sam Peckinpah in his “Straw Dogs”, the first to transfer the idea of righteous retribution with pernicious consequences for the avenger himself to American soil with its root myths of the single hero, and Michael Winner in the “Zhendezhdezhda” where this image was still more important in terms of the hero. But only in the exploitative cinematography, formed in the midst of the sexual revolution and the wild rampage of the peace-loving lustful “children of flowers”, all sorts of Meira Zarqi, Lee Frost and Russa Meyer with unprecedented enthusiasm and furious pleasure began to tear pieces of flesh from the ever-memorable densely dramatic skeleton of Bergman, replacing and substituting for their own discretion the asceticism, symbolism and psychology of it with physiology, naturalism and nihilism, and focusing more on the latter. The denial not only of the Criminal Code, but also of any norms, frameworks and restraining factors has become, perhaps, the main feature of not only the seven-costal-eight-costal revenge movie, but also the modern one, which has managed to oxidize in postmodernism and rot in realism.
From the directorial debut of Joseph Guzman, the pinnacle of whose early cinematic career was the carbon monochrome short film “Clown Chingsaud” in 2006, the film with the too eloquent title “Run, Bitch, Run!” in 2009, alas, from the very beginning, it blows not so much nostalgia for the old-good unprincipled old school, as much as it is a non-appelling option. Perceived as a natural homage and “Woman’s Day” Zarka, and “Last House on the Left” Craven, and almost the whole “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, cheerfully riding the erotic dialectics of Russ Meyer, this twenty-five thousand on the total budget of the film product seems to be no more than an ideal thrash for the sake of thrash, in which everything will be expected to be reduced to anal sodomy with prickly-cutting objects, universal misogyny, reincarnating in a series of surgical chaos, after the totarchy. Moreover, the honorable director, who managed to reach the desired camera and its handle, in order to subsequently bring the audience to the handle with his cinematic handiwork, does not think much about the clarity and logic of his narrative, with pornographic succession demonstrating the most vulgar acts and the cruel tortures that accompany them, but at the same time not observing measures.
Undoubtedly, Joseph Guzman clearly understands the numerous grindhouse genre coordinates, in "Run, bitch, run!" without interfering with the fact that it is impossible to mix in principle into indigestible porridge at the output, but this hardly justifies the excessive incoherence of the resulting cinnabar. The film seems so excessive, suffocating-bloody and grotesque-cruel that this excessiveness progressively to the final becomes its only plus, because even any little bit of artisanal cinematography in the epic-apoplexy and cathartic-hysterical finale of "Run, bitch, run!" becomes anti-cinematography, in the tape everything becomes so bad that it is already good. Blood and silicone are successfully trampled into the concrete of an unrestrained bloodthirsty carnival, while Guzman himself does not even seek to follow the beaten path of Tarantino and Rodriguez or the worst end of Jason Eisener, completely saturating his film with neither postmodern allusions, nor synephilic preludes, nor acutely social critical illusions, fascinated not so much by sophisticated stylization as by its perverted likeness. A caricature of naturalness. Caricature almost in the style of “Charlie Hebdo”, only this time under the crosshairs of the virgin servants of Jesus, with one stroke of a machete and a stroke of a strained phallus turned into no longer believing in anything and anyone blindingly bloody bitches, who at the end of their greedy revenge can only run, burning crosses with crucifixes and bridges over Madison County with curses. God will not save them and Satan will not help them.
6 out of 10
If you have at your disposal a meager budget, amateur actors, poor equipment, non-professional operators, editors and composers, from the scenery only the backyard of a slum lost in the desert, God-forgotten American village and the surrounding area, but there is a good idea and I really want to make a film in the genre of a cruel thriller, then it is not a problem, you can still make a movie. This can be done with the whole process per week. And when viewers are horrified by the low quality of the filmed and mounted material, you can pass all this action as a thrash horror and many will begin to treat what they see differently. Someone will even see an interesting idea, non-standard performance, interesting directorial moves, specific style and will cease to notice the general wretchedness of the whole creation. Apparently, this is what Joseph Guzman reasoned, who was eager to apply his skills as a director, producer (and not only) and make the film for a modest budget, without much physical and moral stress.
In fact, all the good ended at the stage of working out the overall idea of the film. The girl becomes a witness of murder, after which she is held hostage by criminals, subjected to torture, humiliation, but despite everything survives and begins to take revenge on her tormentors. It's not a bad idea! And many writers manage to develop this plot, bring more drama to it, the directors manage to transfer it all to the screen, adding a tense atmosphere to the film, the actors comprehensively reveal the characters of their characters, make them empathize with their heroes, etc. But when you do not want to spend time on this most thorough study of the script, casting, shooting some scenes more than once, working out the action scene, dialogue, forcing actors to give their all on the set, you get a senseless and merciless thing. Like, "Run, bitch, run." Again, in this film, all the good things ended at the stage of thinking about the plot, or rather in the first five minutes of this very process. For the rest of the film makes a depressing impression.
I do not want to understand the acting game, it is at an amateur level. These guys have no future in the acting profession, except to play in the extras. They could not convey emotions or make them empathize with their heroes. They look at each other when they need to shout, talk to someone, go somewhere, shoot someone, but all this with such a missing expression on their face that the desire to enjoy their play disappears at the very beginning of the film. It creates a strong feeling that either everything was filmed in one take, or the director specifically commanded to play as unnaturally and hulkingly as possible, or these people simply made a mistake with the choice of profession.
Operator's job fits into acting. It seemed that everything was shot with a statically fixed camera, from which the already sluggish development of the plot completely lost the remnants of at least some entertainment.
The plot develops so unintriguingly that you do not even notice how the situation in the frame changes. It is striking that among the many scenes in the film there is no connection and smoothness of the narrative. After an hour of viewing, you can see that the main character has already rushed (or rather began to sluggishly move with a shotgun through the streets) to avenge herself and her friend, but at the same time all these tortures, murders, sex, etc. have left absolutely no trace, did not cause a drop of emotions and the mind refuses to take everything seen sanely. Murderers do not cause negativity, but the main character of compassion. All plot twists of the picture are forgotten immediately with the onset of the credits.
The music in the film cuts the hearing, from which I want to turn off the sound.
The editing is made very rough, in pieces (often weakly related to each other) and it is difficult to perceive everything that happens as one integral film.
But all these shortcomings and the overall terrible quality of the film, Guzman and his comrades tried to hide behind the screen of “thrashmouvy”, but even creating such a movie, one should respect the viewer. And not to release on their court not intriguing, boring, repulsive film with disgusting directing and acting.