Vindicta

Greetings again from the darkness. Sometimes low budget horror movies work, and sometimes they don't. As a general guideline, the less complicated they are, the better the chance of successful entertainment. Director Sean McNamara (THE KING'S DAUGHTER, 2022) is one of the more prolific directors you'll find. His work includes TV series, videos, short films, and feature films. He currently has 15 projects in the hopper. Sean is a busy man.

With a script by Ian Neligh and Steven Paul, this film offers moments of hope, but mostly it's too ambitious ... a rare criticism these days. Trying to tackle too many story lines creates a mess in the exact place a decent little genre film could have been born. Elena Kampouris (MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 2 & 3) stars as Lou, a rookie paramedic just out of training. Fire Chief Rick (Sean Astin, THE LORD OF THE RINGS franchise) reluctantly assigns her to a first ride in the middle of riots, protests, and fires in a rough part of Seattle.

In addition to the mass chaos in the city, there is a masked killer on the loose - one who thrives on vicious and violent attacks. Suspicions arise when the same building burns that burned five years earlier, killing a mother and son. Fortunately, Lou is not a typical newbie. She possesses fighting skills and is fluent in Latin and Mandarin. Latin comes in quite handy since the killer scrawls his messages in Latin, leaving Lou to assist Detective Russo (Travis Nelson) with clues in the case.

In addition to her skills, Lou is also the idealistic daughter of retired cop played by Jeremy Piven ("Entourage"). The two are so close she even has a bobblehead of him on her car dash. Lou still blames her 9-year-old self for not saving her mother's life, no matter how many times people remind her she was just a kid. Perhaps you are starting to sense the issues with the film, and I have yet to mention the corruption and greed at the heart of the killer's mission of vengeance. One nice touch is the mask ... it's Michelangelo's David, and it's plenty creepy, even if most of the characters here don't come across as real people. Elena Kampouris is to be commended for giving her all to the role, but the writers and the film likely would have benefited from the KISS approach, Opening in select theaters and on digital beginning October 6, 2023.

The movie in general, and the ending specifically, are beyond stupid. But I like what happened to Jeremy Piven. That was nice.

Plus watching Travis Nelson in a suit for an hour and a half is a good use of anyone's time.

There isn't much more to say. It comes across as a C-story plotline in a WB spinoff of a spinoff of a spinoff of a DC television program. As if they scrapped the bottom of the barrel of comic characters and added dumb cops.

Think Catwoman's cousin's hairdresser's cop brother moves to Seattle and finds all the worst type of overly elaborate serial killers with goofy MOs. Then a Serbian AI bot farm wrote the script.

Yeah. Costumes were viewable though.

Wow. Full disclosure, I couldn't make it through this. It honestly felt like a bad attempt at a parody of "Seven" but directed by someone whose background is in Nickelodeon sitcoms and has never seen the film. If you want to piss off Jeremy Piven in a bar, ask him about this project. Fairly early on (but not too long before I shut it off) there is a scene where they show a defunct theater marquee advertising Jerry Lewis' "A Slapstick of Another Kind," one of the worst wide theatrical release films ever produced. I assume it was a tip of the cap or a thumb of the nose to someone on the production related to that steaming present. In retrospect, it may be the best thing in the film because it makes me laugh that such a horrible picture would intentionally reference one of the few films it keeps company on the very lowest of celluloid rungs with. The best I can say about this picture is the camera is always in focus though the lighting is all wrong, along with its direction, script and existence.

The potential was there for this to be an OK flic. Good actors, not a terrible story. Exceptionally poor script. As a horror fanatic I've seen everything. I can appreciate campy, cheesy, poorly written horror done for the sake of being that way on purpose. I even enjoy horror that's "so absolutely bad that it's actually good." Type of flics.... But THIS? The actually tried to be good and they failed epically. It's just so bad that i had to come here and write a review for the abomination that I just wasted my time on. I won't give any spoilers, but for the love of God, just don't waste your time. It's truly a showpiece of how to make a terrible movie. That being said, go ahead and watch it so you can see what I'm talking about.

I thought this could maybe (please) be a story of a clever serial killer with a grudge. More like Kevin Spacey in Se7en. It's not.

Worse for the plot line is having a pretty young paramedic who coincidentally speaks Mandarin and Latin and knows jujitsu...And nobody at all thinks to look up events from only 5 years earlier with this same building?

The irritation for me was the mix of dog Latin with quotes from Virgil's Aeneid, and, worse still nobody explains the inclusion of Ancient Greek gods rather than Ancient Roman gods in this Latin fest. Ancient Greeks spoke Ancient Greek. And they came well before there even was Latin. Ancient Romans spoke Latin. And they had their own gods.