Shattered Ravings

Albert Pyun has done it yet again.

My copy of Bulletface finally came in the mail yesterday. So, after kids went to bed last night, I sat down and watched it. My reaction:

WOW.

Even though I knew the basic plot, I was totally unprepared for this movie, and blown away by it at the same time. It is an excellent excursion into the dark side of humanity, for sure. And after watching it, I believe that Mr. Pyun achieved exactly what he wanted to when he said,

“I really wanted it to be, stylistically, like a contemporary version of those great B crime thrillers from the poverty gulch studios of the time like Monogram. They were shot fast (Bulletface was shot in 5 days), shot on the cheap (Bulletface cost just a bit less than $100,000) and shot with a lot of creative desperation which mirrors the plights of the Bulletface characters.”

I must preface this by saying Bulletface is definitely NOT for everyone. It is unrated and contains brief but graphic depictions of rape, as well as violence, nudity, and the occasional gore scene. For those that cannot stand to watch such scenes, I would certainly stay clear of this film. But if you feel you can overlook them and enjoy the movie anyway, get ready for a fun but grim and gritty descent into the underbelly of society.

For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, the plot of Bulletface is this:

The story is set along the Mexico/California Border, principally in Imperial Beach, CA. It concerns a female DEA agent, Dara Maren, who, in protecting her petty criminal younger brother, gets herself arrested and imprisoned in a nightmarish penal colony outside Tijuana. You can guess how bad it gets in there — prison officials even harvest organs from the inmates. While she’s in prison, Dara’s brother is murdered by a drug lord who’s creating a new DNA-altering drug made from human spinal fluid tapped from the living.
Hundreds of dead bodies are turning up along the Border, and the drug addicts become something not quite human. The drug is so addicting that even law enforcement and government officials are on the stuff. A rogue FBI agent bribes the prison officials to let Dara out to avenge her brother’s murder as well as bring down the drug lord in ways the Feds can’t. When Dara comes out of prison, she is not the same person who went in. The catch? She only gets a 60-hour get-out-of-jail card and must return to the prison to serve out her 20-year sentence, or the FBI agent must take her place.

Make no mistake: this is not a happy-go-lucky movie where the characters are warm and caring, living in a happy utopian-like world. On the contrary, the folks in this movie are cold and conniving, each looking out for his or her own interests and having little regard for the value of human life. But that is part of what makes everything in this film so much fun. When watching this, you never really latch on to any of the characters and get the ‘warm-fuzzies’ from them because they are all so bad in their own ‘special’ ways. I mean, you have to be a scum-bag if you’re harvesting spinal-fluid from the innocent, right?

The movie itself looks exactly like a B-grade exploitation film, too, right down to the grainy picture in some scenes and the sometimes-muted sound. But again, this totally works for the movie, helping to give it an even edgier feel and also helping to instill an even deeper sense of darkness to the overall tone. Add these traits to a plot that is rich with revenge, deception, betrayal, and, well, murder, and you’ve got one hell of a movie.

My only complaint about Bulletface is the lack of special features on the DVD. I am truly a geek when it comes to outtakes, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and the-making-of segments in the special features sections, but unfortunately there are none of those. Curnan Pictures attempts to make up for that by including four other discs in the exclusive 5-disk collector’s edition of the movie, which includes a special director’s commentary of the film, a CD of the movie’s soundtrack, as well as a bonus feature movie (Left for Dead: The Inferno Version) and its soundtrack CD.

Overall, I rate my experience with Bulletface very high. Mr. Pyun has taken me on a crazy, drug-filled, violence-crazed experience that I won’t forget. I still rate his Nemesis and Cyborg films higher up on my Like-list, but I’m very glad to see he is pushing the limits of cinema and still working hard to entertain fans like me.

MSB

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.