“The concept was to have a large, creepy building where each floor served as a ring of hell, and Satan was in a chest freezer in the basement morgue. The concept was vague and lacked a clear protagonist and antagonist (hell is a force of antagonism, not an an antagonist itself), and by nature The Inferno was a passive, observational story, but something about it felt right. Can’t really tell you why, but it did. After many days of soul searching, I decided, for better or worse, that this was the story I was going to pursue.”

The film stars Bitch Slap‘s Julia Voth!

Thoughts?

Donny:

10 - Splice

9 -Piranha 3D

8 -The Runaways

7 -Buried

6 – The Expendables

5 - I Spit on your Grave

4 -Kick-Ass

3 - Black Swan

2 – Monsters

1 - Let Me In

Jon:

10 – A Nightmare on Elm Street

9 – The Crazies

8 – Clash of the Titans

7 – Bitch Slap

6 – Best Worst Movie

5 – Kick-Ass

4 – The Human Centipede

3 – Machete

2 – The Last Exorcism

1 – The Wolfman

Agree? Disagree? Comment below with your favorites!

The Film:

The premise of this 20th Century Fox film is an interesting one: When employees at Mayflower (not the moving company) gaze into a reflecting surface, an evil twin appears on the other side intending harm. Like a human voodoo doll, the character in the mirror commits an injury, which the real character feels. One punk eats glass and slices his face, a VP severs both Achilles tendons, and a hot-bodied nymph in an obvious homage to Psycho falls through her own shower.

The protagonist Max (Nick Stahl) suffers from flashbacks about her girlfriend’s death. As such, Max visits a shrink and is placed under her care. That he resembles a hybrid of Keith Carradine, Mark Hamill, and Killer Film’s own Jon Peters certainly does not help. Working as a night watchman at Mayflower as the behest of his father, Max begins to see visions. It seems Max’s near-death experience yields him paranormal insight and glimpses into the impending doom of others.

I spent much of this film wondering about the evil doppelganger in the mirror. What makes them so evil? Fortunately the last twenty minutes of the film pull the disparate threads together, leaving me with a catharsis of fear and pity Aristotle subscribes to tragedy.

The DVD:

Audio/Video:

Very suitable. The look of the film never drew attention to itself, even in the darker scenes. The audio is fine, too.

The Other Side: Making Mirrors 2: This ten-minute features the vision of director Victor Garcia, who directed Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007). Insights into the filming on a low budget in and around Baton Rouge, LA. Ten minutes.

Keeping It Real: Visual & Special Effect: Learn about the special effects behind the most gruesome murders in the film. Observe the intersection of CGI and prosthetics. Twelve minutes.

Deleted Scenes: Three scenes you will soon understand were not in the film. Two minutes.

Previews: Be the first to learn about these upcoming releases: Dollhouse Season 2, Feed Your Fear, Bitch Slap, and Vampires Suck. Yeah, so do these previews.

*Note: This was a screener copy, so a few extras, including the Korean film, for which provided the basis for Mirrors 2, was not included.

The Film: Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The DVD: Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The Film:

Sometimes we hinge too much on trailers, but how could one not get excited for the Bitch Slap trailer? It oozed that long-lost sleaze once made popular in Russ Meyer sexploitation films of the 1960′s like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). Oh, those by gone eras. Quentin Tarantino has made these old exploitation genres somewhat hip again with his odes to them in Kill Bill (Shaw Brothers Kung Fu films) and in Grindhouse. One of the key things those old B-movies had that Tarantino didn’t was the ability to make their films without much self-referential nods and a sky high budget. I mean, it took Grindhouse $60 million dollars to do what someone like Umberto Lenzi or a Russ Meyer had in $10,000′s.

Bitch Slap has a lot going for it. Following Russ Meyer’s conventions of babes, boob fascination, and female empowerment, the flick had it all down to a T. Heck, it was even a low budgeted film! Where Bitch Slap goes off of the rails is in two key areas: one is the pure excess. How much is too much? Bitch Slap clears showcases how much is too much, with a slew of flashbacks (that really ruin the film’s momentum and plotting), music video moments, and slow motion scenes of girls either getting out of the car or flipping their hair back (like from a guy’s POV, that’s not a bad thing, but after the umpteenth time it is). The story is simple, yet director Rick Jacobson mixes way too many things together. Three girls are in the middle of a desert looking for some buried diamonds. Amongst their attempts to find it, there will be an onslaught of double-crosses and plot twists. None of them work, and they constantly ruin the simple story.

The flashbacks try to add to the twists, sometimes given us back story, but it hollows the film. By keeping it simple with the buried diamonds angle, the cat fights, the villains, in the middle of the desert, we would have one nice little flick. The script isn’t clever enough, as it tries to be satirical towards the sexploitation genre, but it isn’t Black Dynamite. If anything, Bitch Slap also tries to be a Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez flick on a dime. Again, it fails.

The other major problem is again with the flashbacks. The flashbacks are all filmed with a digital matte background and it isn’t rendered well, taking you out of the picture. By taking these flashbacks out, it would’ve streamlined the film. These digital matte back grounds are starting to become pretty popular in low budget film making, and I understand why. They’re probably cheap to do, helping the director to open up ideas and film faster, but without some time and money, they look bad.It’s all a shame, in the end, because of what Bitch Slap had going for it. There’s just these few little rotten apples and pears amongst the delicious melons.

The DVD:

Audio/Video: For a DVD, the presentation is really good. The image is highly detailed and colorful. While the FX/digital elements don’t hold up, it’s certainly not the transfer’s fault. The Dolby Digital audio is loud and aggressive. There’s nothing to complain about from this Fox release.

Commentaries: The first track, featuring the director and producers, talk much about the film, although I found it dry at times. The second track features the girls as well as the director and producers, and is fluffy but a fun listen. Topics like boob sweat kept me listening.

Behind Bitch Slap: Would you believe me if I said this making-of is 99 minutes? Don’t fret, even if you weren’t this film’s biggest fan, the doc is impressive. It’s pretty thorough, easily making the commentaries useless, which is good, in my opinion. Interviews, on-set footage, table reads, this covers it all, offering up a nice look at what goes into production of a film, let alone a low budget film.

Conclusion: Bitch Slap should’ve been better, but it’s all so excessive, in the areas we didn’t need the film to be. It’s mildly entertaining, regardless, as the Fox DVD is great. Like where’s the Blu-ray?

The Film: Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

The DVD: Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Synopsis:

BITCH SLAP is a post-modern, thinking man’s throwback to the “B” Movie/Exploitation films of the 1950’s – 70’s as well as a loving, sly parody of the same. Inspired by the likes of Dragstrip Girl;, Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill; Kung Fu Nun and the pantheon of Blaxploitation films, BITCH SLAP will mix girls, guns, outrageous action and jaw-dropping visuals with a message… don’t be naughty! At its core, BITCH SLAP follows three bad girls (a down-and-out stripper, a drug-running killer and a corporate powerbroker) as they arrive at a remote desert hideaway to extort and steal $200 Million in diamonds from a ruthless underworld kingpin. Things quickly spin out of control as allegiances change, truths are revealed, other criminals arrive for the score, the fate of the world hangs in the balance and they are forced to confront a villain much worse than they ever expected… themselves. It’s the ultimate morality tale as, one by one, they realize the whole she-bang was a set-up and one of them may not even be human… What also makes BITCH SLAP different is a complicated “B” story device that runs throughout the film to illuminate character, backstory and relationship histories not previously revealed. Like the film Memento, these scene flashbacks take place in reverse, so by the end of the film, you have a wholly different take on who these women are and why they are behaving so badly. Bet you never saw THAT in Jailbait Babysitter!

Source: YouTube