This is the weirdest drama I've seen since Satan's Touch. It's definitely a drama, because while people get shot and the story (for the most part) is about murder, it's not a thriller. It is merely an extremely unconventional romance, filmed in an extremely unconventional way for the reason that this was the director's first feature in a while that wasn't hardcore porn. Watching Flesh and Bullets, you really won't believe that Carlos Tobalina made any movies prior to this one, as it's as naive and clumsy as today's direct-to-video piss buckets like Birdemic and A Talking Cat. The movie's awkward shallowness clashes with its desire to do a million crazy things at once, creating a weirdly engaging experience that's over before you know it.
When the movie opens, we see a man named Jeff trick two homeless guys into helping him a rob a bank. He does this so he can make alimony payments to his ostensibly bitchy wife, Dolores. While celebrating his success in a Vegas bar, he meets Roy, who also has an ostensibly bitchy wife named Gail to whom he owes an extravagant amount of money. Roy jokes around that he wishes his wife was dead, and this gives the two men an idea: what if they killed each others' wives? It would be the perfect crime, as there would be no apparent motive. Yep, it's Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, except they're both guys at once. At first, they're fine with killing the women, until they have sex with them, and when they meet their opposite's kids. Jeff has always wanted a boy, which Roy has--and Roy always wanted a girl, like Jeff's kid. But both men know that they are liabilities to one another, and both believe they can't get out of the deal without killing the other. This tension is largely forgotten as other matters arise, like snakebites and abusive exes. And awkwardness.
All of the awkwardness.
How awkward is this movie? Well, near the beginning, we see Jeff have sex with a prostitute. This is not the awkward bit, surprisingly, because after they're done, she says to him, "Wow, I really like you! Maybe next time, I will let you make love to me for free!" Jeff's reply: "I'll know it when I see it...or rather...when I feel it." Cut then to what appears to be a barely off-camera hardcore sequence! I can put it into words, people, but only the image itself may speak.
The acting takes this early scene's outlandish discomfort and carries it throughout the whole film. It's not quite to the levels of I Am Here...Now, but it does come close to the Breen Zone at times. However, it is sometimes jarringly broken by the random appearance of professionals, like the thirty second spot with Cesar Romero. No one except these errant professionals can do anything convincingly, which makes scenes like Roy's recounting of his gang-rape at the hands of gay pro wrestlers (!) cross a number of unexpected boundaries. Every chance Tobalina gets to have things obey a sense of continuity, he ignores.
The movie runs in a linear fashion, sure, but for the most part, it doesn't feel that way. There are some weird plot holes that almost don't seem like plot holes, by merit of the dream-like nature of the shitty acting. I feel like the way the two men describe their wives completely contradicts what we see of the women, and how the women describe their husbands contradicts what we've already seen of the men. I remember Jeff saying Dolores was frigid, for example, but when we meet her, she loves sex. There are also fakeout death scenes for Jeff and Roy which confused me enough to rewind a few times. Actually, now that I think about it, I had to rewind a lot of this movie. It runs about 90 minutes but it took up my whole afternoon...
I really don't know what to say about this. Every scene and shot is strange to experience. Maybe I'm just weird, but there's something fundamentally wrong about this movie, in an entirely captivating way. Perhaps this is a telling look into the head of a porn director. More likely it is just a look into the head of Carlos Tobalina. If there are other romance movies like this out there, I wanna know about them. Drop me a line. And while you're at it, drop this movie a line, and be hypnotized. The best "Flesh" movie of them all!
If you like the site and want to see more awesome stuff like it, consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!
No comments:
Post a Comment