Judges

Sadly IMDb does not allow me to rate Judges lower than 1. What a shame. This ghastly movie is so bad that I actually turned the damned thing off well before the ending. The script had a few bright moments, but the directing, editing, acting, audio quality, and especially timing on line delivery was so abhorrent as make Judges utterly unbearable.

Judges was advertised as being like a modern day comic book style western, but in reality was nothing of the sort. What it is most like is dog poop on the bottom of your shoe. You can try to pretend it is okay, but it just keeps on stinking.

Why video stores think it is okay to carry this kind of crap with constant gaps in the audio and worse than high school drama class acting is beyond me. We rent movies in order to see something better that what is on television. But Judges is worse than the most pathetic SciFi Channel original. I intend to demand my money back from Hollywood Video.

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.

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.

I wasn't sure if I was going to like this film going in. I'm not a huge fan of westerns and don't know that I've ever seen an indie western. But after watching I was pleasantly surprised. A fan of the "bad guy" I really enjoyed the performances of Paul Ricioppo as "Sonny" and especially Terry Jernigan as "the Barber". I thought it was clever having modern day cowboys carrying six shooters and speaking straight out of the 1800's while driving Mustangs and having showdowns in the alley behind a 70's disco club. Makes you wonder, what if justice today was like the Old West. Maybe you challenge the guy to takes too many items through the express lane at Wal-Mart to an old fashioned duel.

This indie was pretty good for a straight-to-DVD movie that are usually reserved for horror films starring an actor no one really cares to see anymore. Instead, there were some refreshing new faces (Sean Doherty and DJ Perry) in a well crafted film. It didn't have to hide its lack of budget in dark shadows or flash gratuitous nudity to get people to say, "well at least that chick got nekkid".

Listen, the story won't blow you away so don't try comparing it to Tombstone or summer blockbusters and yes I think it could have been even better, but it does provide some laughs, a little action and some interesting characters in a movie that is a much needed change from the typical straight-to-DVD garbage that even Hollywood is putting out.

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.