paul_d_day

It's not that there are any huge plot twists to Poor Pretty Eddie. There aren't. You can pretty much predict what's going to happen and when. If you want plot, don't watch this.

If, however, you want low-level unsettling Southern Gothic that builds the tension, fear and dread until it's almost unbearable this is the movie for you.

Like Deliverance, this is an exercise in mood and tone. It's a great big eggshell of a movie, always just on the verge of shattering.

Poor Pretty Eddie is a kept man. He's a gigolo that found a broken down former girl singer and latched on to her. And she to him. It's somewhat of a trailer park Viginia Woolfe only much sadder and desperate. There's no future for anyone here. It's a never ending purgatory. Liz Weatherly, a jazz diva from New York, takes off on the spur of the moment to get some peace and quiet. Her car breaks down and there's the movie.

The most amazing element of the movie is the sound mixing. It goes off into truly terrifying flights of discordance like Tom Waits or Carnival of Souls. The climax of the movie rewrites the vocal to Amazing Grace so that it's unrecognizable and then piles on more and more sound until you can feel the oppression and fear that Liz goes through.

It's one of the most brutal films I've seen. And I won' watch it again. But I'm glad I saw it.

Maybe it's because I've been stuck on the time period, but I could have sworn the was a mid-70's movie. Instead, it's from 2009. I couldn't tell you whether it was an artistic choice or that the budget was non- existent. Either way, the vibe is there down to the washed out colors. As with a lot of 70's gore films, the acting is mostly atrocious. Buddy shines through, however, as the lead psycho. The special effects are, at times, laughable, such as the whip marks. the scalping was well done though. There's a scene on a river that you can't hear one of the actresses when she's speaking.

All of this should add up to a lousy rating and yet.... They've got the vibe right. A few scenes and images gave me that "holy s**t" feeling in the pit of my stomach. With a better budget and better actors, this would have been stellar.

I'll be honest - I couldn't finish this. I'm not sure I've ever seen a b- movie try so hard to be pretentious. It comes of like Plan 9 meets Grand Hotel. A full 20mins gets taken up establishing the apartment building that will be terrorized. Worse, it comes with time stamps as if there's some sort of urgency in the blandness and horrible acting to follow. It's hard to know if the lead villain is Hispanic or a French guy doing an Hispanic. Another small quibble - why are villains all dressed up like BDSM submissives? One would think they'd want to dress a little more dominant.

This is a poorly written, directed and thought out piece of crap with literally nothing to recommend about it.