Inspired by true events (or so the opening title card claims), The Tail Job is a comedy that’s high on energy but low on laughs, getting by on its committed cast and a Hollywood-friendly narrative. After a violent and pointless opening, the film cuts to Nicholas (Blair Dwyer) taking a cab driven by Trevor (Craig Anderson) to spy on a woman with his camera. When Trevor asks Nicholas what he’s doing, he says the woman is his fiancée Mona, and he’s trying to find evidence that she’s having an affair. Several days earlier, Nicholas looked at Mona’s phone and saw her exchanging flirty messages with a man named Sio Bohan, and Nicholas wants to catch them together. Trevor takes sympathy on Nicholas, deciding to help him tail Mona for the night in order to find out who the mysterious Sio Bohan really is.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Nicholas misread the name of Mona’s girlfriend Siobhan as Sio Bohan; in fact, it only takes someone smarter than Nicholas or Trevor to make that discovery. It’s a cute misunderstanding that makes for a funny anecdote, but as the foundation for a feature-length film it runs out of steam almost immediately. Either way, the mistake causes Trevor and Nicholas to follow a bunch of false leads and red herrings until they get the attention of a dangerous gangster who actually happens to be named Sio Bohan, who sends out his goons to take care of them for some reason or another.

The Tail Job’s plot is deliberately silly, with co-directors/co-writers Bryan Moses and Daniel Millar using the standard formula for a Hollywood mystery/thriller and throwing in whatever absurdity they can. That approach can work, except the Siobhan/Sio Bohan mix-up is pretty much the height of what kind of comedy the film offers. Jokes constantly fall flat or go for the lowest common denominator, whether it’s a hacker insisting that only “full penetration” counts as cheating or a prostitute whose only purpose is to point out that she has a lot of sex. None of it works, and the poor treatment of the (very few) female characters only makes the comedy look worse.

But as problematic as The Tail Job’s script might be, it does inspire a few laughs when it skewers the kinds of familiar story beats and lines of dialogue we’re used to. Moses and Millar have a good understanding of how the genre they’re operating within works, along with a lot of ingenuity and technical skills that make good use of their small budget. That, combined with Dwyer and Anderson’s strong performances, gives The Tail Job a momentum that helps move things along, a quality that goes a long way when dealing with a comedy that just isn’t funny.

In the empty landscapes of rural Washington, a meeting is about to go down between two people: Abe (Conner Marx), a young journalist trying to make a name for himself, and Debra (Carol Roscoe), who works for the US government. Their meeting is the result of a series of back and forth communications, with Debra wanting to release sensitive information involving national security. From the moment they meet in person, the word “trust” gets thrown around more than once. For Abe, it’s making sure Debra’s a legitimate source while trying to stop her from being spooked so easily; for Debra, it’s a matter of not getting caught handing out classified information. They may be surrounded by vast flatlands, but their location exposes them just as much as it exposes anyone who might be watching them. Over the next hour and a half (shown almost entirely in real-time), Abe and Debra will try to trust each other in order to get what they want. On the other hand, viewers can place their full trust in writer/director Nathan Williams’ hands. If There’s a Hell Below is the kind of back to basics take on a conspiracy thriller that feels refreshing and riveting at the same time, with a confidence behind the camera that establishes a new name brimming with potential. Here’s a film where the word “Hitchcockian” is not just apt; it’s earned.

For its slim runtime, Williams goes against expectations by making as much empty space as possible. When it comes to story, it’s not about the specifics of why Abe and Debra get together. Her specific role in the government is never expanded on beyond a meaningless job title, and the information she has for Abe doesn’t get explained or broken down (all she has is a list of names on a flash drive). Williams’ deliberate avoidance of specifics helps make the situation easier to get pulled into, as it gives him the ability to hone in on the dramatic core: two people entering a possibly life or death situation, with no way of knowing they’re safe until they’re unsafe. Williams’ set-up doesn’t provide any evidence of Abe or Debra being who they say they are, and no knowledge of whether or not they’re being watched. They meet in the open countryside with no one else around them, but they act like they’re in an enclosed space with eyes all around them.

Initially, Abe and Debra’s characterizations come across as a little too familiar, with Abe’s ignorant cockiness making him look less like an opportunistic journalist and more like a victim in the first act of a slasher movie. But like everything else in Williams’ film, it’s a deliberate move. Abe turns out to be a small-time reporter desperately looking for a big break, and his behaviour comes from not realizing the stakes of the situation. Early on, when Debra gets scared once she sees a parked SUV in the distance, Abe decides to drive right up to the vehicle to show her she has nothing to worry about. It’s an annoying sequence until Williams throws in a nice punchline, one that’s predictable but pulled off with such aplomb it’s hard not to crack a smile.

The assured direction extends out to the film’s look, an aspect that’s vital to why If There’s a Hell Below works so effectively. Taking full advantage of the spacious locations, Williams and cinematographer Christopher Messina create one painterly image after another, at times evoking Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World but with a more sinister edge. It’s an impressive control over mood and atmosphere that heightens the intensity, especially in the latter half when the film closes on a terrific, wordless epilogue, a mini-narrative that drops just enough information for viewers to piece everything together. It’s that kind of cool, confident filmmaking that makes If There’s a Hell Below a highly entertaining shock to the system, a thriller that shows how a skillful hand can make all the difference between a good film and a great one.

First-time writer/director Paul Taylor wants you to know that Driftwood is, in his words, “a reaction to contemporary cinema.” Citing excessive exposition and the old adage of style over substance, Taylor intends to make a film that breaks things down to cinema’s purest form as a visual medium. What that translates to is, in a literal sense, nothing: Driftwood doesn’t have a single word of dialogue in it, strictly relying on actions to communicate themes and plot. It’s a bold move for Taylor or any new director, but it’s hard not to feel a little hesitant about the move given its origins. Could Taylor’s eschewing of dialogue be an opportunity to provide a breath of fresh air from more standard indie fare, or is it merely a reactionary gimmick whose purpose is to stand out for the sake of it? Driftwood luckily doesn’t fall into the latter category, with Taylor sincerely trying to break from the norm to explore different ways of keeping viewers engaged, even if his methods might have their own shortcomings.

Opening with the arresting image of a Woman (Joslyn Jensen) possibly suffering from some sort of amnesia wandering out of a beach, Driftwood cuts to a Man (Paul C. Kelly) taking the Woman back to his house. There’s no relation between them from the looks of it—he more or less found her on the beach and decided to take her home—and the Woman is so far gone she doesn’t even know how to go to the bathroom. Is she suffering from amnesia, or is this something supernatural or stranger? That’s left up to interpretation, but when the camera lingers on a shot of the Man touching his new “friend” a little too affectionately, there’s no need to guess his intentions with her.

Without dialogue, Driftwood’s narrative keeps things basic. What the film boils down to is the Woman trying to escape from the Man, as her growing independence is met with harsher treatment by her captor. An unwarranted trip outside prompts the Man to lock the Woman in her bedroom when he’s at work, and her successive acts of rebellion lead to stricter living conditions. The Man’s motives for his behaviour get an explanation from Taylor early on, a bit of development that highlights the benefits of Taylor’s approach. With all the emphasis on visuals and sound, there’s more room for Taylor’s themes to take centre stage.

Aside from the more ambiguous questions surrounding the set-up, Driftwood’s straightforward storyline also means there’s just a lot more room altogether, and that space starts getting felt as the plot becomes repetitive. Later in the film, the arrival of a Young Man (Michael Fentin) threatens to shake things up, except it plays out more or less as expected, eventually falling back into the routine established earlier. That’s not to say Driftwood is a stale film by any means, though. It’s an inherently active viewing experience, with Taylor’s cinematography and the two lead performances keeping things both dynamic and engaging. But with more attention paid to what’s on screen, the patterns and repetitions inevitably become more noticeable as well.

So while there’s plenty of room to chew on Driftwood’s ideas of loneliness, grief and trying to rebuild the past, the comparably lacking story means more attention winds up being paid on filling in the background information, theorizing on the origins of the Woman and how she wound up rising out of the beach like a newborn. Those mystery elements make Driftwood a fun curiosity and Taylor’s refusal to give context is more than welcome, but it can only take the film so far. Nonetheless, Taylor can easily rest his film on its own ambitions. Driftwood showcases the good and bad of making a dialogue-free film, but it also shows the kind of riskiness that more indies should attempt.

There’s an interesting effect the so-called “sex comedy” has on our collective response to racy material. As far as sex goes in film, we seem to react in exact proportion to the way the film’s characters treat the subject. If sex is taboo to the characters, we’re exhilarated to see it happen, if sex is boring for them, we’re desensitized and numb. A virgin anticipating their first time places sex on a pedestal we can’t wait to see them reach, and a person who uses sex for comfort won’t surprise us with their promiscuity.

This is where How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town goes especially wrong (except maybe also in having such a long title). It assumes that the audience has its own opinion on the audacity of the sexual escapades happening and will find humor in being shocked, but then gives us characters who express no such sentiment and thus direct our reactions to be just as tame as what we’re seeing. It’s an interesting conundrum and seems to get at the heart of comedy itself.

Jeremy Lalonde may not be trying to shock us with his film (which he also wrote), but he’s at least trying to make us laugh. Opening on that all too familiar scenario, teenagers in love about to get it on for the first time, he sets a more dramatic tone to start when the intimate act gets broken up by other teens at the party who instantly shame young Cassie by forcing her to leave the party in her underwear. Feeling rejected by her teen-love, Adam, and trying and failing to get home undetected, insult is added to injury when Cassie’s mother (Lauren Holly), a famous writer of young adult stories, insults Cassie’s sexuality and indecency. In rebellion, Cassie runs through the small town of Beavers Ridge with no top on, solidifying her place in their history.

Fast forward 12 years—or should I say “Flash Forward” in honor of Jewel Staite who plays grown Cassie? Sorry, couldn’t resist the reference—and 30-year-old Cassie is a respected sex-columnist with a book deal. News that her mother has passed away forces her to return to Beavers Ridge. Adam (Ennis Esmer) has grown up to be an estate lawyer who married Heather (Lauren Lee Smith), the snobby girl who broke up their sexual tryst years before. It’s Adam who breaks it to her that her mother has in fact left her nothing, which leaves her in a tough spot as she was depending on an inheritance to pay back her book advance, writers block having left her bone dry.

Things get interesting when Adam’s wife Heather discovers Adam can’t get her pregnant. This being her only reason for existing means she’s forced to look for viable semen elsewhere. Cassie runs into the old gang at her mother’s funeral and a sort of throw down of prudes versus sexuals occurs. As a sort of gauntlet, Cassie asks if they’ve participated in an orgy, this apparently being the peak of sexual freedom. None of them have, and she leaves the victor. It’s only later that Cassie reveals to her best friend Alice (Katharine Isabelle) that she is, in fact, a virgin. The orgy idea, however, has provided Heather with the perfect way to get her hands on someone else’s swimmers, and with her husband’s blessing. She asks Cassie to lead an orgy, and seeing a potentially interesting story in the entire scenario, Cassie agrees.

It’s at this point that things could get interesting, except that the film establishes very early in the film that pretty much all the participants recruited for this orgy do, in fact, hate each other. Adam and Heather’s marriage is shaky, Alice and her slimy real estate husband Bruce (Mark O’Brien) are separated, Chester (Jonas Chernick) the local record store owner hardly seems the type to be friends with any of these people and is clearly in love with his employee Polly (Tommie-Amber Pirie), and Cassie opts to direct them rather than participate. Awkwardness ensues, but the film misses its mark in what would make a more interesting exploration.

Each of the participants involved in the orgy have some sort of sexual issue, a result one imagines from growing up in a sexually repressed town. Except that their histories aren’t explored in any way and the mental blocks each faces are meant to be more funny character quirks than full-blown plot points. The biggest fault of this is in Cassie’s development, which should clearly explore why a person who’s made sex their life’s work would abstain. The film abuses her abominably by implying that it’s a residual love for her high school crush that has kept her back. For 12 years? There is serious psychological issues here.

The film’s ending only extends its naivete, and doesn’t do much in the way of empowering its characters, especially Cassie. If Lalonde had allowed his characters to mimic real people, it could have found some real humor. But when sex becomes the gimmick, and the characters take on the same old tropes when dealing with it, there’s nothing to laugh at. Unlike more successful indie sex comedies like last year’s The Overnight where sexual psychology fueled the events of the film and provoked thoughtfulness as well as laughs, How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town checks its psyche at the door and represses laughs as much as it represses true sexual experience.

An inventive satire about the ever-narrowing relationship between artist and audience, Director’s Cut has a lot of interesting ideas bouncing around inside its twisted, experimental narrative, though on a fundamental level, the movie simply isn’t that compelling. Penn Jillette plays Herbert Blount, a stalker psychopath who donates a ton of money to a crowdfunded horror movie, his reward being on-set access and permission to shoot behind-the-scenes footage. Not content in his role as financier, Blount hatches a plan to take over the movie by replacing the director, stealing the footage, and kidnapping lead actress Missi Pyle to shoot additional scenes. We learn all of this via a director’s commentary provided by Blount over his new version of the hijacked movie, a unique storytelling approach that’s amusing until the schtick grows old about halfway through.

At first, it’s incredibly intriguing to watch the opening credits of the fake movie while listening to Jillette in character as Blount, using his shoddy After Effects skills to cross out director Adam Rifkin’s name and scribble in his own as he drops nuggets of sophomoric moviemaking knowledge in an attempt to give us a peek “behind the scenes.” As a character, Blount is a moderately entertaining take on the entitled fanboy, an heightened representation of the dangers and mild absurity of crowdfunding. Blount’s creepy obsession with Pyle provides most of the movie’s humor, with him trying to pass stalker footage of the actress both out in public and in her hotel room off as new scenes for the movie they “collaborated” on. Jillette’s voice is one of the most recognizable out there, which is a good thing in that it always holds your attention, but a bad thing in that it’s hard to associate what we hear with Blount and not Jillette, the lovable entertainer we’ve associated that voice with for decades.

As the story unfolds and the gimmick loses its luster, Director’s Cut reveals itself to be a sort of bland abduction movie that doesn’t offer any real chills or thrills. It isn’t very disturbing, suspenseful, frightening or even funny. Playing themselves alongside Pyle are Gilbert Gottfried, Nestor Carbonell, Hayes MacArthur, Harry Hamlin and Jillette’s old friend and cohort, Teller. The horror movie they’re “acting” in is generic by design, so all of the interesting stuff is saved for the leads. The movie arguably exists in the found-footage category but doesn’t capture the real-world horror that sub-genre was designed to elicit, mostly due to the fact that the dialogue is a bit too theatrical.

The folks at Red Letter Media created a character called Mr. Plinkett a few years ago who does video reviews of movies while giving us glimpses into his twisted personal life, in which he kidnaps women and murders women and sells homemade pizza rolls via snail mail. It’s a similar concept but works better than Rifkin and Jillette’s movie because it delivers the goods, providing serious film critique underneath all the craziness. Director’s Cut doesn’t offer the raw, fundamental genre joys one would expect from such a wacky project. The idea to make a crowdfunded movie about a demented crowd-funder is fun, but this movie isn’t.

Director’s Cut Slamdance Review Rating:
5/10

Following in the footsteps of Alex Ross Perry’s comedies and 2014 SXSW winner Fort Tilden (whose co-lead Clare McNulty shows up here in a small role), Robert Putka’s MAD deals almost exclusively with watching selfish, heinous people behave in selfish, heinous ways, with Putka setting his sights on a dysfunctional family and their bipolar mother. Mel (Maryann Plunkett) suffers a breakdown after her husband leaves her, winding up in the hospital when she’s found uncontrollably sobbing by her neighbours. Mel’s daughters Connie (Jennifer Lafleur), a successful corporate worker with a husband and two kids, and Casey (Eilis Cahill), unemployed and trying to figure out her life, convince her to commit herself to a psych ward in order to rehabilitate herself, a choice fueled more by selfishness than a sincere desire to help their mom.

Of course, being a family with its fair share of relationship issues, every interaction ends up devolving into a brutal war of words between mother and daughter(s). Putka, who also wrote the screenplay, knows how to write some great passive-aggressive barbs (when a dejected Mel tells Connie that her daughters hate her, Connie calmly responds with “Casey doesn’t hate you”), and his game cast do a great job making their arguments crackle until the acid-tongued screenplay gets the better of everyone. For the most part, Putka’s tonal balance between sweet and bitter works (largely because of Plunkett’s performance), but the constant repetition of Connie or other characters lashing out at one another takes its toll, eventually making scenes feel like Putka trying to constantly one-up his own insults. That makes MAD work against itself when it tries to humanize its three leads, resulting in a rocky ending when the film goes for an emotionally satisfying payoff. Fans of extremely caustic humour should get their fill with MAD, and while Putka’s attempt to find a middle ground between the sincere and cynical doesn’t entirely work (a hard task for anyone to accomplish, let alone a first feature), he shows enough wit to make MAD’s ambitions worthwhile.