I’m watching my way through Dustin Wayde Mills’ oeuvre this year, and I will say that RIP: Rest in Pieces has a more traditional plot shape than your usual DWM movie.
A mook is on the run from the cops. He stashes a satchel, and then something bad happens to him. So bad we don’t even see it. The mook survives just long enough to tell his boss that the satchel’s been stashed in the old school, but not any more detail than that. Unfortunately, the old school has a bad reputation, and as the boss notes, the mook “didn’t beat himself to death.”
The boss has several people who owe him favors, however, and he dispatches these five people (three women and two men) to find his satchel. If they return with it, all debts are forgiven.
Much violence ensues.
RIP is in black and white, and DWM has some nice composition and use of shadow throughout the movie. I don’t really miss the color. We’ve all seen enough black and white movies to recognize the shade of blood, especially when it’s coming out of someone’s head or dripping from a ripped-off limb.
My favorite moment in the movie is when one of the women is identified as The Princess of Perrysburg, the preferred madam of the local criminals because her girls are clean, not like those floozies from Toledo.
There are definitely times when the movie is trying a bit too hard with its dialogue. When it works, it works.
Client: “Are you leaving?”
Cleaner: “The hard part’s done now.”
Client: “What am I supposed to do?”
Cleaner: “Stop. Killing. Women.”
And when it doesn’t work, it’s just trying.
Woman: “Eat shit!”
Man: “I would … just to see where it comes from.”
I don’t have much to say about Sex Machine. It was a great low-budget noir-ish thriller with shades of amnesiac Frankenstein monsters thrown in for good measure. A bona fide Good Movie. The movie’s name comes from a mysterious tattoo that the main character has, and which is a plot point for Reasons. I suppose a mysterious tattoo of “Live Laugh Love” would have been harder to market as a horror noir title.
In 2006, it was a fantastic idea. Make a horror film as a web series of interlinked vignettes. Then when it was all done, they Frankenstein-whipstitched it into a movie, and released it on DVD. That is what I watched.
When Evil Calls revolves around a cell phone with a demon at the other end. Or maybe it’s a djinn, because it grants wishes in classic monkey’s paw style. But it wears evil clown makeup, so whatever it is, we can all agree that it’s evil.
The movie is set in a private high school. The wishes are what you would expect from high school kids. Some of the monkey’s paw reversals are clever, and some are obvious (“I wish I was hot”). The majority of the movie is bad things happening to “teenagers” (most of whom are obviously too old to be actual teenagers), rinse and repeat, and then the clown is defeated and dissolves at the end. So despite all the deaths along the way, it’s a happy ending.