★ 2 / 10
Villains versus villains
dannorder
The main protagonist is one Madison Sheffield, played by Mindy Robinson. In any other movie of this type she'd be the lead villain. You see, Madison just…
The main protagonist is one Madison Sheffield, played by Mindy Robinson. In any other movie of this type she'd be the lead villain. You see, Madison just nonchalantly soaks her body in the blood of humans... and killed her husband for arguably less than what she is doing now herself. Now, granted, the Overton window these days is pretty dark, what with the attempted legalization of the killing of immigrants and so forth, but knowingly bathing in blood seems pretty extreme. (Yes, that sound like Elizabeth Bathory. Yes, Bathory is in this. No, it's not Madison.)
Also, speaking of bathing, I don't know if Tubi had an edited print, but this film revels in showing that Madison is naked for long periods of time without actually showing the actress naked. So she has convenient hand placement, or camera angle, or the film is cropped at the exact right place to make it close. It somehow comes off as more humorous than titillating, though, like you are watching a scene in an Austin Powers movie or something. I hear Tubi sometimes has edited movies and sometime has the original version, so I don't know if it was supposed to be this way.
Besides the bathing in blood, Madison has strange dreams. Although they aren't really dreams. Or, mostly anyway. Sometimes she has them at times and places that really wouldn't make sense. And they never really add anything to plot. So whatever.
(Did I mention that the film is really slow moving? It feels like the plot is maybe 15 minutes long and they padded it with an hour of fluff.)
Robert Z'Dar, who was the title character in the Maniac Cop franchise (so the villain, not the hero), plays Gerry the Jaw. He's a mobster who joins up with Madison -- along with a guy who has a flashback that we're all supposed to believe was meaningful but wasn't really and is somehow the non-love love interest who nobody cares about -- to pull off a heist. Except they don't seem to have any plan in mind. This even though they know ahead of time that the people they hope to steal from have some supernatural power, which they don't know the full extent of. I mean, for all they know, the official bad guys of the film had the power to snap their fingers and turn them into frogs. (And that might have been a better ending.)
So, surprise, the non-plan doesn't work. Everything falls to pieces, characters die, which sounds like it'd be exciting but isn't. The protagonist is in bondage and threatened with certain death after more naughty near-naked squirming. Then something that feels like a deus ex machina saves her. Madison later explains that it wasn't really random, that she had planned this with one of the bad guys. Except said person earlier was the whole reason the non-plan fell apart in the first place. So... why?
I mean, if Madison had planned all these deaths too, it would mean she wouldn't have to split the loot. That fits her character, but there's no indication that she did that. Instead she moons over the death of the guy. And it ends like we are supposed to believe it was a love story.
Also... genre favorite Linnea Quigley shows up briefly about midway to say that she wants to have the baby of a meaningless other character. That character is played by... the director/writer of the film. And... they were supposed to be siblings. It's played off as a joke, but these characters make no impact on the movie itself. He spent a chunk of the film's budget to make this exact scenario play out.
In the end, this movie is a long string of "But.. Why?!?"s over and over, both for what the film shows and what happened behind the scenes. This time I don't want any of those questions answered, because I am afraid of what the answers would be.
Read full review
80%
AUDIENCE
2.8/10
268
•••
seeders ?