Grinder

I am not prone to give films a 1-star review. As a film student from way back in the day, I understand the effort that goes into making a piece of fiction into a coherent (or not) film, and I very seldom find a film SO bad that it deserves the lowest possible score. Then along came "Grinder."

The film is not just badly written, acted, directed, and photographed, I can only think of ONE slightly redeeming feature and that is the performance by Tyler Austin, playing the protagonist, Luke. And that isn't saying much because he had very little to do, where he should have had A LOT of performance to give, but the script shut down anything we might have seen because it was so bland and uninteresting.

At only a, thankfully, 82-minute running time, I was STILL checking the time left, and that started at about 20 minutes in. The long, padding shots leading to nothing were annoying, and there were several of them. The camera is just sitting on a tripod while an actor emotes into it. That's NOT interesting if there is no point and there was never a point. In fairness, although others have said that the actor/director playing Tim showered innumerable times during the film -- again, stupid filler footage -- it only happened twice, but again, just as filler for no real reason. He runs. He's sweaty. He showers. We don't need to be there for it all.

The film should have been, at best, a short film less than 30 minutes long, if it had to be made at all. Jon Fleming, of "Dante's Cove" fame, was ridiculous in his attempt to "be mean." I don't think he has that capability and an extended scene of him trying to do so just comes off as cringing to the point of turning to stone. Skip this. It won't even rise to the level of a cult classic. It's not something you can say is so bad, it's good. It's just really bad.

Stupid, boring and completely unbelievable. Badly written, badly directed and badly cast. No actor should write and direct a movie that shows him (and no one else) showering, repeatedly, full-on naked, every part in closeup. It makes him seem like an exhibitionist who made a movie only so he could do that. It's not sexy or even interesting.

Way way WAY too many minutes-long closeups of faces looking directly into a mirror or the camera, grimacing or trying to look shocked or trying to portray some other unknown emotion. A very badly conceived and executed movie that should never have been made.

This film should be a must in every filmmakers studies as to in how many ways the audible part of a film can ruin all that's been photographed.

The story is good, the cinematography was nice, the editing was OK, the acting was so so. But the audio made this film feel just terrible. The sound is completely flat throughout the film. It doesn't matter if a character moves around or distance or if there's music score on top, the voices are always at the same level making the actors seem much worse than they actually are. There's absolutely no ambient sound which adds up to the I filmed it in my living room feel. And the music is just terrible. Apart from being bad and cheesy, it has no connection to what you're seeing on screen. It's the same type of music which sounds made at home with a basic tool for all types of scenes and often starting in one scene to suddenly stop at some point on a later scene. There are even scenes where the music is so center stage that you can hardly understand what the characters are saying and this goes on for a couple of minutes.

I think with proper sound and music this film would have come much better off, at least decent.

I give it one extra star cause I do like bad B movies feel. But this is not a bad B film, it's just very badly executed.

I literally fast forwarded this movie and missed nothing. This a poorly written, directed and acted 10 minute film stretched into 1:20 minutes. I can't even say it's slow because there is no story line to be slow about. I kept asking when will the movie begin? Don't waste your time.

Like so many versions of this same story, this is yet another retelling of the "innocent kid gets lost in the big city world of sex for pay". The original aspect to this is that we also see the character of Tim (also the writer/director...surprise!), a closeted photographer who gets jobs photographing young boys, supposedly to convince himself that he is just doing it for money. While this actually COULD have been an extremely intelligent and moving story, it falls back on far too many cliches, namely 1-dimensional villains (abusive father, "hot" pimp, clueless girlfriend) which deliver far too many predictable face-palm moments. Like too many gay-themed films, there is an over-reliance on extremely-long close-ups, body-shots (including the periform lead taking a shower...repeatedly). The montage and "cute kid" mugging for the camera for extremely long periods of time just don't add anything to this film other than boredom. Congrats to the creator, Brian, for not having body issues and literally putting it all out there, but this really needed a professional script-reader and director to give it an original look/feel overall-- but in its current form it just looks like a soft-porn after-school special warning against porn.