Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane

Well, you have hand it to the filmmakers on this one. How they managed to hypnotize Lions Gates into releasing this low-budget piece of crap must be an amazing story. Too bad they don't give out Oscars for chutzpah. These guys would be a shoe-in. Why don't I like this movie? Well, for one thing the plot makes no sense at all (how many weeks does raw, nonrefrigerated blood last in the trunk of a car?), the dialogue is horribly overdone and annoying, and the acting is grade C throughout. I actually saw someone praise the cinematography in this movie. Heck, even to use the work cinematography to describe the camera work in the film is laughable, and an insult to real filmmakers everywhere. The film's entire `style' consists of close-up shots of the actors in poorly lit and badly decorated sets. Do these guys know what a wide-angle lens is? The only time it gets a passable grade is in the final 2 or 3 minutes of the movie. It might have been fun if they had made it into a goofy comedy. Actually, Ed Wood fans might find this one a treat. I just saw this one in a theater, so it might look less cheap on television. Hey, I'm trying to find SOME pluses here. Seeya.

I just watched Blood, Guts, Bullets, and Octane on DVD last night, and found myself rather bored from start to finish. The camera work is sloppy, slipping in and out of focus as it pans back and forth from character to character, zooming in and out, and so on...The dialogue scenes are way too long, and the action scenes leave you feeling cheated, due to the shaky-cam, fast editing style that tries to conceal the lack of blanks and squibs. A good action sequence is created by the actual action onscreen rather than jerky camera work and loud sound effects. This film shows very little real action. The story takes way too long to get started, and once it does, it becomes boring, with very little pay off at the end. However, I have to give Joe Carnahan credit for making this film on such a low budget; regardless of the story, simply planning and executing this shoot is an impressive achievement. Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi still remains the most legendary low-budget action film ever made, with better writing, directing, cinematography, and special effects than Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane. So to sum it up, check this movie out, but don't expect too much; it is what it is.

Check this one out if you like corny, campy action movies. I'm not ashamed to say that I do, and enjoyed it. The acting is wooden, but come on, the movie had a miniscule budget. The story is pretty good, and the dialogue is (unintentionally?) hilarious.

Have you ever watched a VHS (remember those?) that was copied from a tape that was already a copy? If you did, you'd know the quality was really bad by that point. That's how copies work...the more generations you make, the worse it gets. That's pretty much how I'd sum up this film. It feels like a Tarantino rip off, and all but Tarantino's first couple movies are rip offs themselves (you can call it an "homage" all you want...the dude steals stuff and makes a few minor changes).

The plot is pretty basic at best. A couple of friends decide to save their failing used car dealership by taking on more than they can handle with a random assortment of bad guys. Of course by the time that happened I was already bored to tears. The writers try to make up for a tired story with some snappy dialog and succeed once or twice, but overall the whole thing is just one big failure. They should really remove the "blood" and "guts" part of the title...there's not much of the former and none of the latter. The "bullets" part is up for debate as well since there's not much in the way of gun play going on. Sadly, there's not much of anything going onat all. Period. It's just bad...even for a low budget rip off.

It amazes me the impact that two movies ("Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction") can have. Quentin Tarantino has become by far the most imitated director of his generation on the strength of those two movies.

"Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane" is one in a long, long string of Tarantino ripoffs, but it's certainly not a bad one (like "Two Days in the Valley," which made me want to puke). As the title suggests, it's high-energy, high-impact, and gritty. Actual, indie-film gritty, not Hollywood faux gritty. Still, the overwhelming unoriginality of the whole affair kind of bogs it down.

Carnahan has since attained his own identity and gone on to vastly better things, though: "Narc" is perhaps the best cop movie I have ever seen.