Manborg - Easy To Admire, Harder To Embrace

The film:
Manborg (2011)

The under-the-radar factor:
Shot largely in a garage (yes, a garage) against green backdrops, this chroma-key/stop-action extravaganza was put together in a piecemeal fashion for around a grand using whatever director Steve Kostanski and associates could get their hands on. After a go-round on the fest circuit, the film was made available on DVD and VOD.

The review:

The last few years have seen a multitude of motion pictures with nine figure budgets and the cutting edge technology that comes with them.

And then...there's the done-by-the-seat-of-its-pants intentionally campy sci-fi effort known as Manborg.  Think Troma mixed in with some earlier types of video games and some Ray Harryhausen touches and you kind of get the results of this micro-budget production.

Manborg and his buddy...

At an unspecified point in history, a war has erupted between humans and the forces of hell. A solider (Matthew Kennedy) seems to die in the line of duty against Nazi-stylized demons led by the evil Draculon. The trooper awakens a number of years later with the realization he has been changed. The half-man, half-machine decides to call himself Manborg. In short order he is introduced to martial arts expert Number 1 Man (Ludwig Lee, with an appropriately (and intentionally) hackish dubbed voice). This escaped prisoner gets to kick-ass with the help of the cyborg who doesn't yet understand the powers he has been given. After they've been recaptured by the evil ones ruling what's left of Earth, the other hero characters are introduced. A quasi-Aussie punk named Justice (Colin Sweeney) is incarcerated with his sister Mina (Meredith Sweeney, Colin's real life sibling), a chick who's more of a fearless fighter than any male in the tale. All you really need to know from here is that the Manborg character comes to know how he was created and what he's really capable of and, that after a period of a little mistrust, the four heroic fighters band together to take on the forces of Draculon for one awesome final showdown.

...Bio-Cop

But Wait!!! Bonus movie time. After the 60 minute feature that is Manborg, viewers of the DVD and VOD get an extra treat - a five minute fake trailer for a faux feature called BIO-COP about a mutilated law enforcement official who cannot die and takes on some drug warlords. It is a very funny and entertaining appendage to the main movie and I want you to keep that in mind as you watch the real trailer for the real feature...



But wait again!! Because you're such nice people, let's look at a different trailer with a few different scenes. (There's a point to this, believe me.)



Hey, we're on a roll now, right? Let's keep watching. The folks behind this film have uploaded a few clips to their own YouTube channel (so it's legal and legit). Here's where the henchman character known as The Baron first lays eyes on the lovely Mina.



Okay, so what's with the trailer-thon?

Don't get me wrong...it's not that there aren't things to admire in Manborg. These people put a great deal of effort into a project with the most limited of means. The end result is kind of dazzling (here and there), kind of funny (here and there), kind of good...

But remember what I said about the Bio-Cop faux trailer and how entertaining its five minutes were? Perhaps it's just as well that they never made the actual feature because I'm not sure any true additional entertainment value would have arisen. Okay, that's a dumb comment because, of course, who knows?...

But I did see all one hour of Manborg and have revealed here some four minutes or so of trailers and clips and, to be honest, if there was about two or three more minutes to show from other parts of the completed work, I'm not sure there would have been any great additional value in watching the full movie. Much of Manborg comes across as a private video game where you're not allowed to come in, interact and participate in what fun is to be had. The characters, while an okay enough kind of group, aren't going to get you all that wound up in their lives (although Colin Sweeney provides great comic relief in his semi-literacy moments - the film could have used a lot more of him.)

I'm probably just being a big stick in the mud and on another occassion would have had a different reaction. And there are probably folks out there that would get into the cheesiness of this movie and enjoy it immensely. I really wanted to like this flick but, for me, Manborg was a decent eight minute project wearing an ill-fitting 60 minute long suit. People with less stuck up their ass than yours truly can find the film here.

Mourning Has Broken...With No Time For Tears

The film:
Mourning Has Broken (2013)

The under-the-radar factor:
This film, written and directed by the brother team of Brett and Jason Butler, is one of five financed with a $1,000 grant from an initiative put out by independent filmmaker Ingrid Veninger. It has made festival appearances (winning awards), had a week long run at a Toronto theatre and is slated for a VOD release in 2015.

The review:

The song "Morning Has Broken" holds a special place in the hearts of my wife and I. This Christian hymn (better known to many from the version put out by Cat "You Can Call Me Yusuf Now" Stevens) was played at the beginning of our wedding ceremony. So, I was certainly able to take a trip down memory lane with a recent screening of the micro-budget dark comedy Mourning Has Broken (clever play on words), where the song is given no less than six different versions/interpretations on the soundtrack.

Nice...but not the only nice thing about this spunky effort.

A character known simply as "Husband" awakens one morning to feed his cat a gourmet meal before heading back to bed and to his wife, who, as it turns out...is dead. The plethora of medication on the side table clearly indicates the woman was not well and her passing far from a surprise. Still, the loss is a shock and her husband doesn't seem able to cope with her departure. Putting his best face on and pretending that it can be "just another day", the widower finds the "to-do" list his spouse had made up and sets about to accomplish each of the tasks that would have been expected of him.

The problem is, "Husband" is about to encounter a multitude of assholes in the world outside on what has already started out as the saddest day of his life. His bully neighbour insists on coaching him on how to wash his car. The clerk at a clothing outlet won't allow him to return an unsuitable garment bought for his wife. Fellow motorists are either driving too slowly in front of him, giving the wrong turn signals or are berating him for not moving out of parking spots quickly enough. Once his vehicle shows a flicker of an issue, the nearest auto mechanic is more than willing to upsell the maintenance requirements to come. The audience at a movie house is too busy talking and texting to allow him to enjoy the screening. All along, a certain kind of cake he needs to acquire becomes as easy to locate as the Loch Ness Monster.

At first, our main character tries to keep his cool, taking the high road and staying polite. But eventually, the world around him becomes too much to bear for a man repressing emotions that don't need to be stirred any further. Vocal assertiveness gives way to physical reactions and before "Husband" knows it, he is planning on the kind of retaliations where baseball bats come in handy. His final actions allow him to return to the side of his deceased and conclude his long day in the way he feels he must.



With indie productions in general, and low/no budget efforts like this one in particular, scripts can be the strongest element if enough time and thought have been utilized. Production values are a less certain variable, given the obvious restrictions on what can be accessed and the conditions the filming is done under, far away from high-tech sound stages. The area that becomes the most problematic is the acting talent, since Benedict Cumberbatch probably can't be enticed to show up to your shoot, no matter how fresh you promise the coffee and bagels will be.

Bravo, Robert Nolan

Flip those concerns on their heads and you have the strengths of Mourning Has Broken showing up in reverse order. The lead character is played by Robert Nolan and this guy totally brings it in a way most filmmakers dealing with minimal financial resources can only dream of. Nolan is practically in every single frame and delivers the right blend of inspired lunacy and moving dramatics throughout. His Howard Beale-ish movie house rant is a classic at one end; a flip-side three minute single take in a record store shows a suddenly taciturn man expressing everything in his emotionally wracked face. Nolan is so good that one may be concerned that he would show up the deficiencies in a supporting cast made up of amateurish personnel, but the Butler bros struck gold in that vein as well. The actors the husband character is required to play off of are pretty much all up to the challenge, with a special nod to Graham Kent as that all-too-familiar kind of shady auto mechanic you don't want nursing your wheels.

While there are are occasional signs this film was made for cinematic spare change, the overall look is sharp, with the Michael Jari Davidson's Cannon 5D MKII camera work complemented well by crisp editing. Sound montage and the aforementioned musical score are also of top caliber.

The least hearty aspect of the film is the script, which is pretty much a one-trick pony of sorts. You come to understand that the husband surveys the to-do list, sets off to accomplish a task and, along the way, has some sort of confrontation, to be echoed over and over again. The predictable rinse-repeat cycle is less successful in some scenes than in others. While the movie clocks in at 77 minutes, some of these bits feel too drawn out and often take their time arriving at any payoff. Fortunately, Nolan makes most of these periods worth the wait in the end.

Considering this effort was made for less than five figures, the results the Butler brothers have produced are quite impressive. Many times you've seen a film and said to yourself "I could do better than that!" This film will have you saying "with what they had to work with, how could I have topped this?"

But what does that have to do with it being a film to recommend, especially if folks out there are debating forking out some coin to catch it?

When Mourning Has Broken makes its VOD debut, it will be up against big studio cinema candy, flicks that cost a lot of money and, in many cases, ripped off the movie-going public for at least as much. There are great films to be had in the streaming/downloading world but there are also tons of insincere, dubious ones. A sterling example of how much can be done by extremely modest means, Mourning Has Broken puts many big budget motion pictures to shame.

Briefly - Say It Like It Is

Old friends from middle school years have morphed into becoming adult strangers to each other in Maria McIndoo's micro-budget feature debut Say It Like It Is (2013).

Dylan (played by director McIndoo) is a Philadelphia based wannabe writer who accepts her plight as a bartender to make ends meet, dumping on the urbanized phony artists she labels as the "attack of the clones". She takes a trip into Long Island to meet up with old gal pal Brooke (Rachel Williams). The latter has just moved in with Bill (Alex Karfarkis), the same boyfriend she had been talking about dumping, but now finds herself in the abode he has inherited from his Florida bound parents. Dylan finds it hard to believe Brooke is into the suburban life (including unlocked doors) and talking about starting a family; Brooke seems surprised that Dylan wants to stick to the "writing thing". As if these two weren't out of sync enough, the homeowners are looking after discombobulating nephew Laden (Michael McIndoo), a standoffish kid when he isn't being exceptionally needy. Dylan's next few days feature schedules determined by the "happy" couple's shopping habits or Laden's tantrums. A surprise party for the writer attended by her old friends helps to accentuate how different the two main characters have become.



Some films try to be BIG - all-encompassing, all-knowing, here to have the planet and its seven billion inhabitants entirely figured out. Other flicks try the micro route, examining details in the most petite of proportions. Say It Like It Is refreshingly tries to stay on the same scale as life itself and does a pretty good job of it. The situations are not over-dramatized or carry on as being "important". They're also not drawn out in navel-gazing introspection. The situation here is one you can recognize, the verisimilitude passes the sniff test, and the whole production seems to be in the hands of a filmmaker who knew exactly what she wanted to capture and what to not bother with.

There are some bumps in the presentation - the acting is somewhat stilted at times and the editing has an unimaginative cutting-on-dialogue consistency. But for a production that apparently stuck to less than four grand in financing, the end results bring good value to the 75 minute running time asked of it. After seeing so many cinematic (self) delusions trying to be this or that, it's nice to see a feature which unspools as naturally as this one does. And that's how best to describe Say It Like It Is - it's simply a "nice" film.

(And this feature is currently (11/09/2014) screening over at Cinema Zero.)

Nobody Can Cool - Two Odd Couples Do Not Make One Right

The film:
Nobody Can Cool (2013)

The under-the-radar factor:
The directing/writing team of Marcy Boyle and Rachel Holzman, who piloted this production under the collective moniker of Dpyx, followed up a 2013 DVD premiere with the current iTunes/Amazon VOD offering, a typical route for many indie filmmakers in the absence of opportunities for wider release.

The review:

Andy Warhol said everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.

Notice he never said they deserved to be.

If Andy was alive today, looking around the digital world, I think he may have come up with the observation that, in the future, everyone would make their own feature length film. Hopefully his follow up would be the suggestion that pursuing such opportunities would not always be the best idea.

Case in point: the micro-budgeted wannabe thriller Nobody Can Cool, about a young couple who literately make one wrong turn. Unfortunately, filmmakers Dpyx make several.

Workaholic lawyer David and aspiring entrepreneur Susan (David Atlas and Catherine Annette) are off for a "relaxing" weekend at a friend's abode but zig when they should have zagged and end up at another cabin inhabited by psycho couple Len and the very pregnant Gigi (Nick Principe and Nikki Bohm). The latter fabricate a story about how they came there and something about a car that is no longer available. Everyone tries to do a nicey-nicey shtick (less so the snarly Gigi) and there is a general (if somewhat reluctant) agreement that David and Susan will crash upstairs for the night. These two folks go through a series of motions that pass for romance, followed by some that pass for revelations and disagreements, followed by some shut-eye.  A sound in the night awakens Susan, who discovers their car has been driven away and they have been locked in their room. She doesn't want to put up with that for a moment, whereas David seems to cherish sleep more than his well-being. (Hey, everyone has their priorities, right?) An eventual window escape leads to the city slicker couple's capture by their hosts. Turns out Len and his gal have committed a heist, with Gigi's cousin Tommy lying in a bed upstairs via a near-fatal gun wound, awaiting the return of the real face of trouble, his brother Mo.

But fear not - in a dizzying contest to determine which of these factions has the least common sense, David and Susan take turns with the crooks at capturing and being captured, all the time bickering and proving beyond a measure of a doubt that they shouldn't be a couple in the first place. Len and Gigi, while closer to being two peas in the same pod, are not too far behind in the incompatibility department. Marriage proposals take place at the strangest of times, while plans for from here to eternity are laid out, even though no one's future looks very promising with all these guns and knives being pointed at each other. Eventually Mo appears, looking as dangerous and assertive as we've been told he would be and as confused with the goings-on as he has every right to be. The tale ends with a predictable measure of violence but also a few genuine surprises.

In viewing the trailer you may feel a little left out if you're not packing heat. Everyone else is.



For every positive you can spot in Nobody Can Cool, you'll also notice far too many negatives. The crisp camerawork is betrayed by the unimaginative editing. The engaging performances by Nick Principe as Len and the underutilized Haris Mahic as Mo contrast to the one-dimensional approaches of Annette and Bohm (who don't seem to realize that teeth grinding plus yelling do not add up to "acting") and especially of Atlas, who never looks fully awake, no matter what life-threatening danger awaits his character. And while the story moves along at a good clip, the expressiveness of all the cast has taken the real weekend getaway, replaced by some of the most ludicrous dialogue you'll hear this side of Tommy Wiseau or Ed Wood Jr. The part where Susan and Len decide it's actually okay to do a little alcoholically fueled bonding after she's relived herself in front of him is one for the cinematic Hall of Shame.

So you may have guessed I didn't like this film much. That makes you considerably less clued out than the characters in Nobody Can Cool. Anything else that's positive to say? I will note that in spite of the general lack of merit that prevails, the strong drive on the part of the two female characters in refusing to be subservient to the wishes of their male counterparts is refreshing. I just wish I could say that its worth encouraging these two filmmakers to pursue whatever cinematic goals they have in their future, except, based on this project, I remain unconvinced they deserve such cheerleading going forward. The film world needs more women behind the lens but the results of this effort feels like a setback to that end.

The best thing I can say about this production?...

Dpyx is a pretty cool handle.