STOPPED DEAD

Stopped Dead

Whenever I look at a micro-budgeted independent film, I find myself having to drop my expectations and standards to all-time lows. Let's not dance around here. Most of the direct-to-DVD films being released have virtually no financing, they're cast from a lower echelon of actors and they usually manned by some hack whose major claim to fame is dropping out of film school. Truth be told, 90 percent of them are garbage. But they're garbage with an audience. I generally don't find myself in that audience. It's hard for me to suspend my need for shots to be framed properly, or for screenplays to be well written, or for films to be well-acted. I can think of quite a few DTD films I've seen in the past that I quite enjoyed. But for the most part, I find them hard to get through. They're largely amateurish - because most of them are made by amateurs - but I can't hold that against them. It's fucking hard to make a film. It's even harder to get a film seen. So while I can respect the plight of the truly independent filmmaker, I can't excuse garbage. If you have the balls to make a film, you should have the brains to make it the right way.


Debbie Rochon Stopped Dead

Maybe my problem then isn't with independent, low-budget, DTD films and more with the people who are making them. Every time I am flipping through the channels and stumble across American Idol, I find myself thinking "just because you CAN sing, it doesn't mean you should". Anyone with a camera can make a film in the same way that anyone with a word processor can write a screenplay. But there's a world of difference between saying "point the camera here" and directing. In the same way, there is a world of difference between writing a screenplay and writing a good film. Both require certain skills and both require a level of devotion, imagination and economy of thinking that I find many DTD filmmakers simply don't possess. Being passionate and wanting to make a film is great but just because you CAN make a film, it doesn't mean you should.


Jason Liquori's STOPPED DEAD, a mix of psycho movie narrative trappings and Jack Starrett's RACE WITH THE DEVIL, had me believing for half the film. Here is a movie shot with a degree of care, acted reasonably well by a cast full of people I've never seen before (apart from the seemingly ubiquitous Debbie Rochon, that is) and written in a way that didn't cause me to facepalm every ten seconds. The first half of this film is proper, solid filmmaking. I was enjoying myself immensely - well, except for the screeching, garbage band sounding score that popped up every once and awhile - but then Liquori went and fell into the same trap as so many filmmakers do nowadays.


He tries to get clever and, in doing so, gets sloppy.


Debbie Rochon Stopped Dead

The plot is rather simple. Two couples, Bob and Margaret, and Dante and Minerva, head out on an RV trip. Bob has been suffering from terrible nightmares of infidelity. At the trip's outset, he already distrusts Dante, his friend since childhood. He believes Dante and Margaret are having an affair. While Bob is relatively quiet and insecure, Dante is the total opposite. He's brash, distasteful and an all-around dick. A somewhat successful business owner, Dante still has the mind set of a drunk, horny college kid. They decide to pull over for the night and Bob goes out for a walk. He returns, panicked. He claims to have seen a group of bikers kill someone in the woods. They speed out of there, only to be chased by the bikers, some of whom are firing their guns. After a long drive, they decide to stop at a diner and try to find a cop. They meet Donna, an off-duty cop, who takes their report and sends them on their way. Bob is immediately distrustful. He has it in his head that some sort of grand conspiracy is underfoot and that they need to drive the hell out of there before they wind up dead.


Once Donna is back on duty, she and her partner decide to investigate the incident a little further. It doesn't take them too long to track down some of the bikers. They tell the cops a completely different story. There was no murder. Bob instigated the incident and the bikers were just chasing them to scare them. But if that's true, who is following our quartet around, screwing with them and playing mind games?


Stopped Dead

It won't take you too long to figure it out as Liquori blows his reveal around the halfway mark. At that point STOPPED DEAD ceases being effective and becomes pointlessly routine. Without spoiling the reveal, I will only say that once you're granted knowledge of who the terrorizer - and later, murderer - is, the film becomes maddening. Characters begin shifting viewpoints and allegiances fast and furious, a certain character's death is mulled over for about five minutes before they're forgotten, and all semblance of proper pacing goes right out the window. I felt completely let down by the turn the film took because, and I don't care if Mr. Liquori agrees or not, it was the wrong turn to take. Until that point, STOPPED DEAD was a slight but entertaining film. For it to go down the tired, generic route it does - complete with a ludicrous and, quite frankly, idiotic final five minutes - was severely disappointing.


Perhaps the most striking difference between STOPPED DEAD and the majority of DTD movies I've seen recently is in the casting. This is a film with an older cast - I'd guess mid-forties to mid-fifties - which is something you don't often see nowadays. At times, it felt like Liquori had originally written the screenplay for a much younger cast, maybe mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Some of the dialogue simply didn't fit or didn't feel right, I'm not quite sure which, but I applaud him for allowing us a change of pace from all the big-tits, big-muscles casts most of these films are saddled with. All of the actors play their roles well. Debbie Rochon, in particular, is an actress that deserves far better than the roles she receives. If there is one weak link in the cast, it's Joel Wynkoop, the actor playing Bob. Bob is the central focus of the film and the range of emotions that character has to go through seems a bit too much for Wynkoop to handle. He does an admirable job during the first half of the film but, as the story wears on and becomes weaker and weaker, Wynkoop becomes almost laughable, ruining much of the tension along the way.


Stopped Dead

This film was a pleasant surprise that turned into an utter disappointment. I would absolutely love to see Liquori take another stab at this film, this time with a proper budget and a better realized screenplay. There was massive potential here for a good film and I honestly have to say that he squandered it during the film's second half. I expect that Liquori will continue to make films and hopefully iron out the flaws in his execution. I for one am excited to see his future work. The first half of this film proved to me that he has what it takes to become a good filmmaker. It's just a shame the second half showed what he could very easily become instead.


Not recommended.