American Badger

Vanity projects seldom work even with Hollywood A-listers. When you have a Z-list director/actor doing his own voice-over on an ultra-low-budget indie ... well, let's just say the odds of a successful project are slim and none. And Slim just left town. Every low-budget fail is right there on the screen .. poor lighting, a sound track based on random noises from an electronic keyboard, terrible editing, and an incoherent script. Even the much-touted fight scenes are just a blur, a smudge, of motion that the viewer can barely see.

The American Badger is truly amazing. He singlehandedly kills about 70 hoodlums of various races and nationalities in this film, helped by the fact that his victims politely wait to attack him one at a time and have the collective IQ of a lump of coal. The plot is incoherent, the dialogue is often mumbled, the fight scenes are ludicrous, and the best acting performance is turned in by a dog. This piece of drek must be Canada's revenge on the U. S. for the War of 1812. You have been warned.

Stuntman and cancer survivor (his bio is very interesting) turned novice filmmaker Kirk Caouette stars, directs, wrote, produced, stunt coordinated, and composed the music for this low budget Indie B film, and it was actually not bad - all things considered.

Sure, the story is nothing new, and has been told many times before, but it was still enjoyable right to the end. I feel there needed to be more/better editing. Too many unnecessary shots, and the slow-mo was overused. The normally comfortable 82 mins felt longer with all those useless shots. Then there's the more cigarettes smoked than words spoken issue. I'm guessing all this was to make this a sort of art-house film. The score was actually very fitting for a B film. Although I wasn't impressed with the shaky-cam and poorly filmed first action scene, every other action scene was good, a few impressively John Wick-ish.

Caouette took many risks wearing so many hats, but at the end, I feel they paid off. Like I said, nothing new or extraordinary, but for a newb filmmaker on a tight budget, it's an enjoyable film. Props to Caouette for pulling it off.

When one person does pretty much everything on a film he better be really good at all of it. The acting was okay. So were the action scenes. The story concept was a rehash but one that has worked for other movies in the past. I am not commenting on the production values but they are about what you would expect from an indie movie. Where this movie really missed the mark is the writing. Blank paper could have been fed to the dog in the movie and he could have crapped a better script.

The director - scenarist - main actor is as bad as the movie. 80 minutes wasted 👎👎👎