Death Shot

It just tries too hard.

I think most of the budget went toward aerial shots and bright red food coloring for the blood.

This is 93 minutes (estimated) that you will not get back.

This movie would have been taken more seriously if it were a comedy.

Shot (1973)

*** (out of 4)

A pair of detectives are trying to bring down a drug kingpin who is constantly killing anyone who gets in his way. Everything the detective's have tried has ended with disappointing results but they finally manage to get to the dealer's girlfriend and she agrees to help.

SHOT was filmed while director Mitch Brown was attending University of Illinois and the total film was shot for around $18,000.00. That's a pretty amazing figure when you watch the movie because while there's nothing original here story-wise the film does look extremely good. What impressed me the most about SHOT was the execution because the director really did try to make this film bigger than it actually was.

The film looks as if the budget was a lot more than it was because there's just so much going on. Typically when movies have a budget like this they do everything they can to make sure they don't try to do anything big or anything that is going to add to the budget. What was amazing is the fact that this movie has a lot of helicopter shots, several gunfights and there are also some pretty bloody death scenes. Not only that but the film has some car chases that were rather impressive considering what the filmmakers had to work with.

The performances range from decent to poor but none of them are bad enough to ruin the film or to take you out of it. There's no question that SHOT looks and feels like a student film and it's certainly not as technically impressive as something like Martin Scorsese's first feature. You can also say that the story isn't that original and nothing fresh was done with it. With that being said, fans of 70's cinema will enjoy seeing how creative the filmmakers were without having much money.

I spent some time in college screwing around with 'film making' in the first decade of the 2000's. Maybe that gives me a different appreciation for his movie. I love this. It's campy, cheesy, raw, everyone tries... I think everyone should see this. Just because of the spirit. I've shown it to a couple friends, we still quote it.

In the frozen, washed-out flatlands of some desolate part of the Eastern U.S. strewn with factories and dive bars, a violent war rages between young mercenary drug-lords and bumbling Hicksville cops. With the help of a few unreliable informants recruited directly from the seedy underbelly of said rural environs, the law steps in to eradicate the scourge of dope...and maybe have a bit of fun along the way.

This cash-strapped but ambitious little regional film, unreleased or barely shown at regional drive-ins, made a not-so-impressive debut on home video in the 80s(with deliciously sleazy box art). It's pretty much the slop-job of never-made-a-movie-before messiness one might expect, but entertains despite itself and offers up a few surprisingly violent moments. Much like the equally obscure film "ANOTHER SON OF SAM", this seems to have been made mainly because someone involved with the production had a friend with a helicopter.

4/10

Make no mistake, that this was an independent production made and financed by a group of college film students shot in and around the campus town of Champagne, Illinois. Essentially, two loose-cannon cops running into all sorts of trouble while trying to take down a drug kingpin. There is a lot of car chasing and shootouts to please the viewer.