Judges

I really liked it. Sure, it had problems, but I wasn't expecting a major studio polished offer. Soundtrack was great, most of the acting was at least passable. I thought the location shots added to the tone of the film well. I like spaghetti westerns, especially "Once Upon a Time in the West", and Judges tried hard to capture that (and did an all right job).

For me, the biggest problem was just not enough development of everyone in the film. The 15+ main characters are very well-varied (especially the Afrodeesiac and the Barber), and beg for more screen time and back story, but with a 90 minute film, that's just not possible. Maybe that will be fixed in Judges 2. Looking forward to it . . .

The acting was not believable. The music was as if the composer just bought GarageBand and wanted to have every genre of music in the movie. The sound effects are out of place (probably came from a CD of sound effects) and are overly done. The only interesting character is possibly the barber (who tends to remind me of Val Kilmer as Doc Holiday in Tombstone). As a student of film, I would have turned this movie off in the first 10 minutes since I requested to watch the whole thing, I did. The dialog was predictable and anticlimactic. I am not sure if it was my copy of the DVD, but there were lots of breaks in the audio that made it seems like its on the editing end. The voice dubs were noticeable with no ambient sounds in the scene to blend them in. One thing that stood out was the sounds of the footsteps, which there were a lot of. The movie should have been called Footsteps, because that's one thing I will remember - the shuffling of feet across gravel, the creaking of the wooden floors as someone was walking across, etc. These should have been blended in more with the editing. According to IMDb this movie was made for $150k. I have seen better movies made for less. It appears they, and I mean the director, writer, producer and editor (which is all the same), were trying for a Firefly type of story (minus the space travel and foreign languages - which given more money they probably would have had in there). But seeing how this is Mr. Walker's first full length feature movie, I imagine he will grow from it and learn from the mistakes and improve. Not sure if a sequel is needed.

I can see where the film makers were going with this. But they never really reach their destination. It's supposed to be a homage to Spaghetti westerns albeit set in a sort of mythical modern time frame." But unfortunately it fall short in its attempt. It doesn't have that gritty realism that spaghetti westerns are known for. The characters are not vile and desperate enough like their Italian western counterparts. And, failing these two points, it lacks the humor of a successful parody. In fact it looks like they intended to make a serious film, but upon completion realized they had missed the mark so far that it couldn't possibly be taken seriously. Unfortunately, they also missed the humor mark by a mile. A whole lotta bad movie!

The plot is rocky. The acting is somewhere south of a Jr. High School play. The cinematography is not bad but it looks like it was cut with a machete. I couldn't decide of this was an intentionally hokey flick or if the people behind it actually thought they were making a good film. Think Death Valley Days meets Mayberry RFD. People running around in a 'lawless' modern town wearing quick-draw 6 gun rigs. It has more than its fair share of 'cutsey' stuff. Picture the Good Guys pulling up to an old farm house, and parking the Ford Mustang right in front of a hitching rail. Picture the clerk in a hotel watching an obviously western (hemisphere) movie sporting a Japanese sound track but with English sub-titles. It's all really strange but might be improved if watching it while partaking in a little peyote. It's a real curiosity with modern parallels to every western movie cliché you can think of. There's even a modern version of the good hearted dance-hall girl, AND a twanging Jew's-harp in the soundtrack. Really! If someone brings this to your home for a Saturday night movie session, tell 'em your DVD player died.

Have you ever seen Kill Bill? Allow me to point out that it was shot in a "Comic Book" style, i.e., EVERYTHING was exaggerated: from the dialogue to the action sequences, to the cinematography, the music and even the characters themselves are exaggerated. The reason why is that most comic books (that I have read anyway) have characters that are bigger than life and the themes are exaggerated perceptions of reality. So naturally, these type of films are going to seem kind of cheesy. Why? Because it is a fable. Nothing about it is based on reality. There are no mutants saving us from the destruction of other mutants bent on world domination, no struggling journalist who possesses spider-like capabilities, and no superhuman that can leap tall buildings in a single bound, and so far I have not seen a vigilante dressed up in a bat costume…well, except for Halloween, maybe.

Try to make a comic book based on the movie "Crash". It's not going to work.

My point is "Judges", like "Kill Bill" was shot in this fashion…an homage to the spaghetti western with a modern flair shot in a comic book fashion.

The only difference is, Mr. Tarantino has had a few features under his belt, had a professional Hollywood cast and crew and is backed up financially by the Weinsteins.

Mr Walker has only made one feature and only had the financial help of family and friends, and had his fellow film students as his cast and crew. The majority of the people involved in this feature were very green when it came to feature films. That being said, I think Mr. Walker did a great job with his first feature film. I have seen worse come from the seasoned "Hollywood professionals" than this newbie director from Virginia.