The Big Sleaze

With the release of Fredianelli's previous feature, THE MINSTREL KILLER, you began to see the beginnings of something very special. With THE BIG SLEAZE the spark is still there but there is hardly the same amount of effort.

THE MINSTREL KILLER is a period piece (set in the 70's) and the attention to detail is almost perfect. Also, there was an original score making it very easy to actually get distributed, in some form, due to there being no copyright infringement. THE BIG SLEAZE has MJ's "Billie Jean" play at one point.

For his next picture (and for the rest of his career) the director NEEDS to push forward and make something that can reach a mass audience without running afoul with the law.

In other words Mike, make something you can profit from.

With that said, THE BIG SLEAZE is a lot of politically incorrect fun. The film has a plot but it is merely there to pit its main character (played by the director) into a number of situations that get more outrageous as the running time goes on. Its episodic nature is what keeps the entertainment value up with few hiccups along the way.

In a lot of these underground films you find a lot of one situational type stories due to the micro-budgets these films normally have. Save that crap for television. This is supposed to be cinema! And I think THE BIG SLEAZE proves that Michael Fredianelli understands this.

The wack job characters our protagonist encounters would be very much at home in some Troma movie. Henry Lee (as a crazed Asian porn star in search for the holy grail of snuff films) and Robert Amstler (as a freelance Rouster who is a loony Toon character come to life!) are two actors who made the most impression on me when I watched it. Their comic delivery is impeccable.

There are few actors who aren't up to snuff with the others though. The protagonist's ex girlfriend and the eventual new girlfriend both aren't very convincing (especially when the latter has to start crying).

The show stopper is the film's pre-climax when our "hero" is hired to blow up Disneyland(!). Now that's something you're not likely to see in any type of cinema anywhere.

I originally wrote a much more detailed, and better, review for this Fredianelli outing but the powers that be on IMDb saw it fit not to publish it.

So, as a favor, I quickly jotted down this capsule of a review. Hope you found it helpful.

7/10

You know, with Fredianelli's continuous evolution as a filmmaker, certain tropes have become rather apparent. That's not to say that his flicks are indistinguishable from each other, but let's take the last three films. All three have a similar character arc for the Fredianelli-lead, all point to the (ever-growing) rhythms of hopeless, desperation, and nihilism, and the camp humor and violence abound to a greater or lesser extent in all three.

In short, Fredianelli's something of an auteur, but I feel somewhat privileged in viewing The Big Sleaze because it's a joke that maybe only 10 people will be in on. As much as it fits with all of the A Wild Dogs Production Presents flicks since A Bird in the Bush, it's as much a throwback to the 30-50 minute shorts that the director cut his teeth on from 2005-8, shorts that reveled in the insane and campy to such a degree as to be alienating to most viewers. That's not to say that these flicks are tame, but in comparison to the old stuff, they're accessible.

In this sense, The Big Sleaze is a great mash-up of Wild Dogs tropes old and new, but I think what really marks this new effort as a high water mark for Fredianelli is that it almost balances every one of his previous cinematic obsessions (the only one missing is racism) into a single product that presents one of the most drastic renderings of his descent-into- complete-nihilistic-insanity narratives.

That's not to say it's completely successful. Some elements fit better than others. The flick features Fredianelli's best gunfight but some of his worst pratfalls (although that moment fits with the Merry Melodies riffing). The humor's quite hit and miss with Robert Amstler, in particular, being quite underutilized. Maybe I'm too familiar with this kind of thing, but I personally found myself much more into the gradual descent into complete disaffection than the cheap and easy laughs to be found in Henry Lee and Nose's storyline (Lee's proving himself to be one of the better actors in the enclave though). The actresses here are the best I've seen in a Wild Dogs pic, and they fit right into the typical WD paradigms for female characters. The difference here is that the better acting points out just how crazy Fredianelli's protagonist becomes. As for the writer/director/star/etc., he's right at home in this kind of material, but it's always tough for me to get past the nerd suddenly becoming Randolph Scott, but that's more of a writerly comment.

I'm starting to get off my train of thought, so let me conclude. I'm not sure that The Big Sleaze is the best of Wild Dogs' recent outings, but I think that the director has crafted yet another nod to contemporary white male alienation (without forgetting, of course, how ridiculous this notion is). While I'm not sure Fredianelli went through a modernist period, The Big Sleaze is a postmodernist Wild Dogs flick, replete with references to Puffs, Socialized Hates, and an ending that riffs on the essential illogic in that last Sopranos episode. While I don't love the comedy, you can't help but shake the feeling that Fredianelli's onto something big here.