"Assassination Nation" (2018) Film festival organizers must have reveled in their own hipness when they created 'midnight madness' screenings for films they considered especially off the rails.....
Naturally, most of the entries were overcooked horror movies with huge gouts of gore......
What the Festival Culture Vultures weren't smart enough to realize -- that sooner or later their midnight screenings would get hijacked by the same kind of pretentious poseurs who slap together the festival's main attractions.......
Exhibit A......."Assassination Nation".........
Every so often during its running time, the film stops to wave around its so-called artistic credentials......with supposed impassioned rants about how our current culture is drowning in the toxic sludge of texting, tweeting, facebook and youtube.........
Okaaaay......the movie's mad as hell and it's not gonna take it anymore.......yeah, right....
The premise seems to hinge on what plays like a social media version of the classic Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street".......
Only this time, it's not clever alien invaders who stir up the the paranoia and rage of middle class ranch-house suburbanites......
It's just another hacker, tapping into everybody's google search histories, porn site visits and embarrassing cellphone photos.........the Hack-inator kicks off the online rampage by destroying the lives and careers of the town's mayor and high school principal.......and then it's open season on everybody else.......
Without boring one and all with the plot vagaries...... the humiliating reveals of everyone's secret stuff turns the whole town into a masked, gun-toting mob, hungry to find social-media witches to hang from the nearest utility pole.......(which officially starts the 'off the rails' part of the proceedings.....)
As their designated targets, the mob settles on the film's four teen girl protagonists......one of the girls computer IP address has been traced back to the hacks.....
Then at long last we arrive at this crummy film's whole reason for being.......a blood drenched gun battle between the girls and the mob.......literally awash in gore, an exhausting, dreary Tarantino-esque slaughter that drags on forever, steeped in its own pandering cynicism.....
At that point, you realize the film was only made to make midnight film festival attendees go whoop-whoop and start tweeting and texting to jack up buzz for the movie........you can practically hear the filmmakers rubbing their hands in glee from the back of the theater........
We've wasted enough precious time on this.......Zero Stars (0).....if this was a tweet, we'd end it with ...."# It Sucks")
No comments:
Post a Comment