The Scarlet Worm

Don't you just love these bogus glowing reviews that the film's cast and crew write and then commission other people to also write on here? "Hey, rate it even an 8 or a 9 so it doesn't look TOO obvious that we padded the rating ourselves. But no lower than that!" The film is a boring, molasses-paced mess and the storyline is just laughable (and that's being nice!). The lead actor with the fake greasy mustache is also a talentless schmuck who obviously just got cherry-picked by his own friend to star in this. Films where a group of friends or bed buddies all get together to make are fine, just acknowledge that sometimes there's very little talent among your little cult. And for God's sake, don't come on here writing glaringly obvious fabricated reviews glorifying yourselves!

This movie was quite a surprise. Here we have quite a few ingredients for a complete failure; very low budget, a period film, lots of physical violence and action and a medium sized cast of mostly inexperienced actors (and a few well-worn veterans). On top of that the screenplay wasn't content to be just some genre template; I think it really wanted to be about something. The fact that they pulled off anything with those obstacles is a plus. I have to applaud the filmmaker's ambition even if he effectively shot himself in the foot because of it. A western might seem to be a simple type of period piece to do but if you are attempting it with limited resources you need to either scale your film down to maximize them, or really stay on top of your game and be attentive to all the details. Mr. Fredianelli did neither. I wonder what he would have created if he had?

It is a bit of a tough slog to get through if one cares only for the quality (or lack of it) on display. The screenplay, although it rises above the vast majority of low budget screenplays - in what it attempts - is still repetitious and frequently awkward. No doubt it's heart was in the right place but you don't film your "intention", you polish your darn screenplay and make it acceptable! It tries to provide interesting character "bits" but because the exchanges seem unrehearsed (or like poor quality improv) they don't feel believable and the film stumbles to a stop again and again. Dialogue veers from a conscious attempt to sound "period" to almost casual modern profanity while dropping anachronistic phrases and attitudes left and right. Much of it's serious aspects seem neither developed nor even well thought out.

Particularly deadly for a period film that wants to be seen as something other than neighborhood kids playing cowboys, there doesn't seem to be a clear grasp of the time and place while at the same time I got the impression the director knew there should be one: people are not as clean and neat as modern counterparts, however the effort to achieve this is comically bad - very specific smudges on cheeks and brows that seem only to have come from contact with a make-up artist. And how do you explain the town's barber who always wears chaps, unless they were part of a western costume he borrowed? And the town's hookers with their modern underwear and lingerie? The fabric of the shirts and the modern styled jeans? The lead character wears an anachronistic suit, but they knew he should have a different type of tie. Of course the fabric, fold and cut of the tie looks like it belongs to a last minute available resource, not the period, but at least there was the attempt.

The actors perform as if they are still in the process of learning their lines - nothing else could excuse the halting, labored way sentences slowly stumble out of actor's mouths. But, having said that, at least the performers were not encouraged (or allowed) to be unnaturally over-the-top; the sort of hammy theatrical style so common amongst wanna-be actors only experienced with the community or collegiate stage. So again, a big plus tempered by a big negative.

The director was wise enough to know he needed his frame filled with texture and dressing however this only translates into a wide disparity between the appropriateness of props and set dressing. A more experienced (or talented) visual eye could have also shown how to better compose shots so that the environments seemed real; as it is 90% of all interiors look as if they were shot in the same place, slightly - and unimaginatively - re-dressed. They are also shot in such a way that it looks like they could only dress one wall, and a corner, per "location" - I'm sure moving the camera would reveal things we shouldn't see. Because of this limitation more than half the film is visually flat and stagy.

Obviously the director aspires to be a Peckinpah or a Leone - and he is to be praised for aiming high - but the number of shootouts and violent confrontations require the ability to pull them off. In this he only achieves a fifty percent success rate, which is commendable; but if he'd had fewer of them he could have spent twice the time and effort to get them perfect. One can see him straining to recreate a Peckinpah blood-bath vibe, but when half your violence is rather embarrassingly staged and shot, you're not doing your film any favors.

Unfortunately it strikes me as the work of a film fanatic who is happy enough just to attempt something, and is far less concerned with whether he is doing it well. I'll give him respect for using blood squibs but why settle for such poor consistency blood? Or the over reliance on the terribly cheesy digital gun flash effect (when we'd be seeing much more smoke than flash from period firearms)? And if he wants his films to be good, as opposed to just ballsy, he should do some research (or recruit people with the appropriate skills and knowledge). The production reeks of enthusiasm over ability, and fosters the concern that he might not know the difference. And if there had only been more polish to the poorer parts, it wouldn't be so difficult to sit through.

I found myself curious, and mildly optimistic, to see what this filmmaker would do with future projects but a quick search reveals he's made another 29 of these little films in the past seven years so I'm wary the optimism, however slight, might be poorly placed.

Nowadays I reckon we're lucky if we get a great western every decade or so. This doesn't qualify for great, but it is good. If you're expecting "Hollywood" - raise your expectations... this is better.

The action in the movie plays well. With influences of Peckinpah mixed with ("early not quite there yet") John Woo; credit where it's due, it didn't get unreal.

The dialog could have been tweaked better, I reckon, there was ample opportunity through the settings which were done well. The scene in front of the barber shop is an example of where the script could have gone deeper, and pushed this movie into great. Overall I liked the pacing, the arc and the various spread of characters. It didn't get overly deep into the characters, but neither were they shallow - there's an edge to all of them. I thought Montgomery Ford did a fine job.

One thing I really liked about this western? It treats the audience with a bit of respect - allowing me to draw my own conclusions; meeting with my expectations in terms of credibility, there were no "cop outs" in plot. What happened was a logical, if whacky series of events.

If you really like westerns, I don't think you'll be disappointed. I am very surprised by the low rating the movie seems to have - strange; maybe good, hard-boiled westerns are just out of style...

This effort by a band of six young cinephiles works well. Don't watch it expecting "High Noon" quality acting and scripting. But if you're looking for a highly original, yet true to genre Western, I recommend "The Scarlet Worm."

It was released by "Unearthed Films" so I expected a 30-or-more year old film, literally dug up out of old B movie archives. But this is a new effort, made in 2010 and released in 2011. The setting is the early 1900s, and plot is complex, including traditional cattle rustling, revenge killings and more. It's dark, gritty style is evident in the gunfight sequences and in the sympathetic, non-sensationalist treatment of the girls in the brothel. It held my attention right to the last as it unfolded.

A couple of things to note: First, it has some pretty violent scenes so I wouldn't make it a family-night movie. Second, it features some classic Western movie stars whose heyday was decades ago but whose names you might remember, like Montgomery Ford and Dan van Husen. They and their young compadres give this low-budget movie panache. Enjoy, pardner.

The Scarlet Worm: Finally! Wild Dogs in mass-release! Longtime fans had a lot to get salivating over: Fredianelli free from starring and cinematography and able to focus on directing, Lambert writing (after his wildly successful two previous outings with Fredianelli), Stielstra starring, special guest stars, and a solid, sordid grindhouse set-up. Everything was in the right place, but with all of these elements, the final product ends up feeling a bit too restrained, a bit too tame to live up to its premise and the promise of all involved. If the earlier Fredianelli efforts sometimes felt a bit slapped-together or a bit rough around the edges, this effort feels a bit too pretty and concerned with professionalism (a gambit that seems to have paid off in some ways). A perfect point of comparison is A Habitation of Devils, Lambert's previous collaboration with Fredianelli. That movie is super rough around the edges, with a script that barely manages to bounce between generic stereotypes and digital video cinematography sometimes so underlit to the point of indiscernibility. However, it manages these hiccups due to a sense of what, for lack of better terms, I'll call "going for it." This same "going for it" mentality is all over other WD pics like The Minstrel Killer and even the recent Apocrypha. Why then does even Stielstra, normally a maniac when facing the camera, play it so cool? Why can't the genre kings (Fredianelli and Lambert) deliver on some of their promises? Why does Print have a reputation for being such a dirty bastard and such a merciless killer but never show us why? Why can't we see what makes his work such poetry to him (as he says over and over and over again)? Even the flick's abortion subtext feels pretty inoffensive and tame (unexpected, consider the distributor Unearthed Films, generally known for stuff like the Guinea Pig and Slaughtered Vomit Dolls). Money was well-placed to grab Dan van Husen, who provides most of the flick's best scenes, but even his work and the (as- expected) excellent shoot-outs feel bogged down by a laborious execution of the basic genre steps. There is a nice father-son dynamic between van Husen and Stielstra, but even that seems to too frequently be displaced in favor of other beats and concerns. I wanted to love this one so much, but in the end, I just can't find as much to love about it as in the cast and crew's other various projects.