I watched this tonight. I started watching Kalifornia, with Brad Pitt, Juliette Lewis, David Duchovny, etc. But it looked like a steaming pile of poop. So I stopped, and watched this instead.
This looks and feels pretty low budget. But it has Chris ‘Doc Emmett’ Lloyd, of Back To The Future fame, in a starring role. It’s massively unlike most mainstream fare. And that’s a very good thing.
The IMDB plot synopsis succinctly sums up the basic idea: ‘In a small Midwestern town, a troubled teen with homicidal tendencies must hunt down and destroy a supernatural killer while keeping his own inner demons at bay.’
I’m not going to bother delving any further. Suffice to say, John Cleaver (Max Records), our central young dude, is struggling with sociopathic tendencies and ‘dark thoughts’, living a fairly dysfunctional life in a nowhere Hicksville US town. And a serial-killer is preying on local folk.
There’s a dark humour at work here. And it’s also refreshingly ‘kitchen sink’, as opposed to Hollywood gloss. Apparently it’s based on a book. And I’ve read that it’s a quite faithful adaptation. I have no knowledge on that score.
The final surprise is a pretty whopping one. And takes the movie quite abruptly into territory I normally avoid like the plague. But in case anyone doesn’t know, I won’t spoil things.
Where this steers closer to other modern movies is in the several ‘sudden left turns’ aspect. Expectations are set up, only to be deftly switcheroo’ed.
This wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Nor quite what I expected. But I did think it was worth seeing. I’m still not sure what I make of it. Other than it’s refreshingly unlike most movies.