"VELVET BUZZSAW"......... CONGESTIVE ART FAILURE........

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)      We admire the hell out of filmmakers who ambitiously attempt to blend disparate genres to their will........to cross-breed two types of movies that have no business in each other's company and somehow arrive at a cohesive end result that creates its own singular identity.......

                 Nobody said it was easy..........and when it doesn't work........a director that can end up with a film that's either strangely watchable........or the equivalent of a 20 car accident on the interstate.....

                 "Velvet Buzzsaw" is a little bit of both........at first, it erupts in a blaze of film festival glory.......a viciously witty takedown of the art community.......with curators, critics, gallery owners, artists and assorted hangers-on depicted as sarcastic, preening, pretentious, culture-vulture slimeballs..........

                   The film encourages you to hate them......... cause little does this sorry collection self-satisfied, self-absorbed egotists know what's headed their way.........

                   ........and what's in store for them?   A horror movie.

                 Yes, you heard that right.  Grisly death (a la "Final Destination" or "Nightmare On Elm St.") awaits these puffed-up shmucks in the form of a stash of brilliant paintings they stumble on to after the artist's suicide.

                  This mysterious artist, after a lifetime of horrific abuse and torture, has not only left a body of disturbing work painted with a palette of his own blood, but given his art the ability to reach out and destroy those who'd dare to exploit it for profit.......

                  And that covers the the excellent cast recruited to play all the artsy-fartsy smarties.....(Jake Gyllenhall, Rene Russo, Zawe Ashton, Toni Collette, Tom Sturridge,)

                   So halfway through the film, the knife-edge art world satire turns into a glossier version of the old Vincent Price horror film "Theater Of Blood".......(the one where ham actor Price wreaks Shakespearian deaths on the drama critics who forever panned him.....)

                   The actors have a wonderful time with their corrosive nasty characters.........enough to make us wish that the whole movie had been about them.........and to hell with all the crappy, gore-spewing deaths dragged in from Grade D horror films in the $3.74  Wal-Mart bin.......

                    But that's the movie you get here, a lumpy mixture of two opposing genres that never quite makes it all the way through the blender.......take it or leave it.

                   We'll take it with 2 stars (**) for its superb evisceration of  the art community and its game cast......(even the aggressively overacting Gyllenhall, playing an effete,epicurean art critic with a withering wit......yet boasting a sculpted,  rippling physique that makes him look like he's preparing for "Prince Of Persia 2")