Partners

"Partners" is one of those extremely cheap "video films" you either see for sale in the "five dollar" bin at the electronics store or bundled with another DVD and on sale in the supermarket checkout line. Film breaks the rules of regular cinematography (eye-lines are off, extreme closeups to hide things, weird blocking, etc.), the image quality comes and goes (like they switched cameras multiple times), it has bizarre audio mixing errors in certain scenes, and a plot that ends and starts up again because the original run-time was too short. Plot is utterly confusing and full of double crosses and dual loyalties, and one of the characters that is arrested is only introduced at the moment of arrest!

Watch it only if you like confounding cinema in the tradition of "Monster a-Go-Go", "Things", "Suburban Sasquatch", and the Coleman Francis trilogy ("Beast of Yucca Flats", "The Skydivers", "Red Zone Cuba").

I finally found this one after hearing about it from redlettermedia and man, what a piece of crap. Everything felt improvised and tossed together like they had no idea what they were doing. Extreme close ups, terrible improvised lines (Car scene before picking up Peshka or whatever his name was), and the length!!! Most bad movies barely have enough story to make it to the 90 minute mark, well this movie felt like that but had a 130 minutes run time. Dreadful, the only reason I give it 2 stars instead of 1 is that Chris Iengo is hilarious to watch with his jersey accent and mannerisms, everything else sucked. I honestly wouldn't recommend because of the length.

Edit* The movie is only an hour and 40 minutes but said 2 hours and 10 minutes on IMDb. Had me tricked though cause it definately felt like 2 hours and minutes!

I really wanted to give this movie one star, but I have to be fair - the director Peter James Iengo finished it and got it distributed. I've worked on a number of horrible shot-on-video or shot-in-16mm would-be "features" that never even got completed, so props to Iengo for finishing a 100-minute video "movie" and getting it out there for people to marvel at the largely-horrible cinematography (there are a couple scenes early on that look impressively professional, like the opening scenes of a LAW & ORDER episode - but from there it's shot on home camcorder time by your Dad!), the horrendous "artistic" lighting, the audio sounding like it was recorded off the on-camera mic, and the editing that makes the story even more confusing than it already was.

Best of all is footage of Producer/Director/Writer/Camera Operator/Editor Iengo comparing PARTNERS to Michael Mann's HEAT! Be sure to watch that part ....

Id like to get up there and not watch this movie!!