On a Dark and Stormy Night (2010)

• Directed by Ezequiel
• Written by “Bix Smithee” (Emerson Bixbee)
• Starring
  • Juan Riedinger
  • Eva-Maria Leonardou
  • Aaron Massey
  • Tamela D’Amico
  • Mike Tursi
• Produced by Brian Ochab
• Executive produced by “Bix Smithee,” Scot Lifschultz, and Ezequiel Martinez Sr.

The black and white cinematography is almost impeccable. The writing is, with a single exception, superb (despite the fact that the official screenwriter has disowned it and is hidden behind a pseudonym). The acting is also superb, also with a single exception. The editing is confident. The soundtrack is able. And the movie as a whole is reprehensible. Actually, belay that; I’m not sure of it. The characters are reprehensible, though; the degree that we get to know anyone is the degree to which we grow to dislike them. This is one of those movies where pretty much everyone is dead by the end, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving lot.

The setting (there’s really only one) is a backyard Halloween party, which gives just about everyone an excuse to display their inner Hipster Goth for all to see (the only real exceptions are the burlesqued priest and the slutty pirate); there are eight people in all, and we’ll have full introductions as needed.

Gray and Andrew and their respective reactions to what they’re about to do.

Actually, the action really starts the following morning, as people start to regain consciousness around the pool after a night of alcoholic and pharmacological debauchery. The dates are a little hazy, so I’m not sure if the party started a day early and the rest of the events take place on Halloween day, or if a party on Halloween night puts all of the rest of the movie on All Saint’s Day. In any event, the first two conscious are Andrew (Aaron Massey), the homeowner, and Gray (Juan Riedinger), the bearded and intense-eyed Satan incarnate.

Andrew’s a little off his game this morning; last night, in taking his girlfriend Roxanne home, he ran over a child. He’s now worried about the rift that such a catastrophe will put in his relationship with Roxanne, as well as the obvious criminal repercussions if he’s found out. Gray’s gives the criminal problem higher priority: What if Roxanne tells? She’s the only witness; to be safe, shouldn’t Andrew kill her? Andrew’s friend Joseph (Adrian Quihuis), the only other person in the back yard, arises from his drunken stupor long enough to agree: He should just kill her. Andrew is so distraught and off-kilter that he makes only the feeblest of protests as Gray calls Roxanne and, with cleverly innocent machinations, persuades her to come over.

Vette, a girl who likes to keep herself on a short leash.

And while Andrew is making halting conversation with her, Gray slams her face into the wooden fence around the pool, then into the pool. And then he jumps in and slams her head repeatedly into the edge of the pool until its obvious, from the amount of blood and the leadenness of her limbs, that she’s dead.

And this is where I almost turned it off. The violence here is brutal, with only as much fancy editing as was necessary to stage the scene without actually killing an actress. And knowing that I was going to spend the balance of the movie in the company of a remorseless killer, a milksop who was almost okay with his friend killing his girlfriend in front of him to protect his secret, and a third wheel who thought the whole thing was a hoot… Ugh.

Quick! Which one’s the slutty pirate?

Now. I mentioned before a greater number of people, and those other people reappear, having come back from a beer run: Richard (Mike Tursi), the corpulent faux-priest; Leah (Tamela D’Amico), the gothed-out psych major; Vette (Eva-Maria Leonardou), the European dominatrix; and Cindy (Marlies Pinto), aka “Sin,” the blonde and implanted pirate slut. Gray’s frantic scrambles to hide the body while the foursome approaches through the back yard provides tension, and gives the audience (me, in this case) a bit of a shock: despite Gray being an utterly despicable excuse for a human being, so help me, I was anxious for him as he almost was discovered with Roxanne’s body. Somehow danger and peril can make any character a sympathetic protagonist, to a point.

The rest of the movie is overshadowed by the tension that some of the partiers (in Andrew’s defense, he’s not very enthusiastic from this point on) know that there’s a body hidden just under the tarp around the corner of the house. But that kind of tension can’t sustain the rest of a feature film, and it doesn’t have to. Because as Gray explains to Andrew on the sly, Joseph’s completely stoned; what if he sobers up and has an attack of conscience? What if he gets even more wasted and says something he shouldn’t? He’s a liability. He’ll have to die too…

Once we get to a second death, then, it’s pretty apparent that things are going to domino, and Gray will find a pretext for every individual’s murder. Despite all the time spent with him and the time he spends talking, Gray still ends up something of an enigma: we’re never sure if he’s a closet sociopath who’s been looking for an excuse for bloodshed, or if paranoia about being caught for the first murder looses the already negligible social restraints on his behavior. Andrew is the closest thing to a “proper” protagonist here, but he remains almost completely passive, paralyzed by compounded guilt and his own portion of paranoia; imagine the classic everyman character with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, except there’s no angel.

“It’s amazing what they have on Swiss Army knives these days!”

Not to discount the cinematography and editing, which are very effective, but being confined to essentially the single location of the fence-enclosed back yard (there are about thirty seconds spent inside the house as well), the feature seems like a mutated stage play. And as with many stage plays, a lot more of the “action” is actually dialogue which verges on monologues. Much of it comes from Gray, who manages to discourse on matters near and far without giving more than a glimpse into his soul, and most of it is still engaging, for that same Hitchcockian reason that we know bodies are starting to pile up under that tarp. (At least the characters don’t spend most of their breath sniping and bitching at each other, which is the default character for filler dialogue in slasher flicks.) However, the notable exception cited above to the quality of the screenplay comes when Gray and Vette have an extended dialogue about the vanishing attention span of the modern moviegoing public. It just seems like sour grapes when characters in an independent microbudget feature discourse at length about the evils of megaplex blockbusters. And the moment when the conversation goes meta – when they mention the confined location of most B-movie slasher flicks, with fodder being picked off one by one and a brainless blonde bimbo on display (all while Cindy is making theatrical advances to one of the plastic skeletons scattered around for party decorations) – seems too much likes a forced moment of winking humor which seems completely out of step with the rest of the movie.

The other chief deficiency of the movie overlaps with that conversation; it is Eva-Maria Leonardou’s performance as Vette. Leonardou is smokin’ hot, and her European accent (English is obviously her second language) lends an air of exoticism… when she speaks sparingly. However, her command of the language is obviously insufficient for her character to hold forth at length regarding matters of art, psychology, and sociology, as she does during that same lengthy movie dialogue; her diction is only one step up from rote recitation. On top of that, because she lacks any natural facility with the language, she can’t approach the intelligent subtlety that the lines require, and attempts to make up for it with bombastic and melodramatic readings; she sounds less like she should be opining about the decline of the American attention span and more like she should be commanding her winged monkeys to defend her Fortress of Evil.

Screenwriter and co-executive producer Emerson Bixby (who’s credited as “Bix Smithee” at his insistence) has held forth on the IMDb about the flaws and shortcomings of the finished project, mostly centering on the fact that his screenplay wasn’t followed. (He’s probably the reason that this film hasn’t been officially released, either.) From his talk of missing character motivations, triple-twist endings, etc., it seems that his original conception of the movie was different not only in narrative but in genre from the final feature, as he seems to be describing a suspense-thriller with elements of a mystery story. This movie is definitely not a mystery, nor, in my estimation, does it suffer for want of the explication of Gray’s motivation; there comes a certain point when describing the character of a human monster that we not only accept but want his motivations to be alien and inexplicable to us, the functioning members of society. Perhaps Bixby’s original script held place in it for a semi-sympathetic protagonist; I don’t know. If so, it would certainly be a movie entirely unlike the movie that exists under the same name.

“Absolution! Absolution! Or failing that, irrigation!”

From a detached perspective, there’s a certain logic to beginning the film with an event so transgressive (a word I normally hate, owing to its over/misuse) that both the nominal protagonist and the audience feel unmoored from the normal framework of right/wrong, crime/punishment, etc. But I can admire that contrivance intellectually while also avowing that I have no desire to revisit this movie or spend any more time in the company of any of its characters. Depending on director Ezequiel’s goals, that may be a recommendation.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 7
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0