hard luck (2006)

Hard Luck, a direct-to-DVD release, is an offbeat piece of pulp cinema involving the usual gangsters, strippers and gunplay. Not atypically for the genre, it consists of three separate stories which eventually converge.

The first story involves a former drug dealer (Wesley Snipes) who is trying to get his act together and go straight. He agrees to attend a friend's birthday bash, the friend asks for his help in a criminal money-for-goods exchange in the back room of a strip club, and everything goes wrong. The cash exchange turns out to involve double-crosses and crooked cops, heavy gunfire is exchanged, and Snipes ends up fleeing the scene with two suitcases full of money, whereupon he kidnaps a stripper and commandeers her car. The two of them try to drive off the grid, with cops and crooks in pursuit. Needless to say, they bicker and fight until they start to fall for one another.

The second story involves two crazy serial murderers (One of whom is Cybill Shepherd!) who torture their victims on an elaborate stage set up in their country home, complete with spotlights, opera music, disguises, BDSM equipment, and cameras. 

The third story is about a struggling young couple on their way to New York for one of those ultimate fighting competitions. It is obvious from the many deleted scenes on the DVD that this story was once given equal status with the other two, but the back story and character development was virtually eliminated in the final cut, and the couple now appears only as two minor characters who fall prey to the the serial murderers.

Snipes and the stripper make their way to a remote hideout owned by a sympathetic gang lord. Unfortunately, the mobsters sympathy is feigned, and he reveals their whereabouts to pretty much everyone except Oprah, and he only missed her because she had too many callers that day. Snipes and the stripper are wounded in their battles with various baddies, and their phone is out, so Snipes has to make it to a nearby farm to use the phone.

Can you guess who lives there, boys and girls? I knew that you could.

The film is actually quite entertaining for a non-theatrical release. Mario van Peebles directed and shot the film in high definition with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio and plenty of tricked-out lighting effects so it looks slick, albeit very artificial. I suppose the surrealistic look was intentional. It seems that van Peebles was going for pulp fantasy rather than urban grit, because he let the serial murderer portion of the story rise to the level of very high camp, accentuated by plenty of sordid dialogue and violence choreographed to music. The killers' portion of the film has a feel similar to Ken Russell's ultra-camp classic, Crimes of Passion. In my opinion, the Snipes/stripper angle is the best part of the film because it's sexy and it allows some audience involvement, given that the main characters are decent human beings. That part is made far better by the fact that the stripper (Jackie Quinones) gets completely naked twice, once to give Snipes a lap dance during the birthday party, and again when Snipes kidnaps her. (He forces her to strip naked and takes her clothes so she won't try to escape while he sleeps.) Both scenes are hot, and this will definitely earn Miss Quinones a spot on this year's Top 20 Nude Scenes list!!

The film is not wildly original, but it's oddly compelling with a storyline that moves right along, and ol' Mario has a good feel for this kind of material. He doesn't get a lot of respect as a director, but he knows how to make a lurid movie entertaining and sexy, and that's a talent the world needs, in my opinion. I recommend this flick for those who might enjoy a really sexy, sleazy, sensationalized walk on the wild side.

I heartily recommend the film clips. (Two .wmvs zipped together.) They are large downloads and long scenes, altogether about 85 meg for five minutes of HQ video, but very sexy and great fun! Well worth the wait if you have broadband.

 

Jackie Quinones (breasts and buns)

Third party videos:

• This is wild.  A film clip of Alanis Morissette taking a pee (Zipped .mov). In a way, you have to admire her dedication in letting the documentary filmmakers have 100% access to her life. As the street dudes say, she can walk the walk.

OTHER CRAP:

This film, also known as Ten Days' Wonder, is theoretically a mystery/thriller based on an Ellery Queen novel, La Decade Prodigeuse. It stars Anthony Perkins and Orson Welles in a French/Italian co-production created by Claude Chabrol, the "French Hitchcock."

Perkins wakes up in a hotel room with blood on his hands, and no memory of the previous four days. He goes to his old friend, college professor Paul Regis (Michel Piccoli) for help. Seems Paul is known as a logician. Perkins invites him to his father's home to help him sort out what is happening. Each day, for ten days, we and the professor get more information. The key piece is that Perkins has been screwing his stepmother (Marlène Jobert), who is his age, behind the back of his adopted father (Orson Welles, providing an enormous back to hide behind). There is also theft, blackmail, and various other nasty business to sort out.

In the feature length commentary, three film experts go into excruciating detail about shot selection, movie homages, and symbolism, obviously considering this an art film. Frankly, I just saw it as 101 minutes of exposition with no real mystery and a completely predictable outcome. It was filmed without live sound, as is usually the case with Italian films, so the final English dialogue was looped in after the fact, making it sound hollow, and I found the "arty" camera work to be both distracting and too dark.

IMDb readers have this at 5.9.

This is a D. One to skip.

 

Marlène Jobert shows buns and partial breasts in a post sex scene that is shown twice.

 

Scoop's note: I have been disappointed by every single Claude Chabrol film, and as you may remember I reviewed about a dozen of them some 2-3 years ago, including this one.  Chabrol has no sense of how to create an interesting narrative, and he often screws up the dramatic tension of individual scenes which could be or should be filled with suspense. I just have no idea why he is considered a great filmmaker.

I also graded this film a D. My summary: "Chabrol is known as a great filmmaker, but this is a poor film, like an American drive-in movie from the era - Roger Corman, 1970s version.  The basic story is interesting, but it is lazily edited so that there is absolutely no suspense, and the revelation of the mystery provides none of the usual pleasure derived when a solution is posed. The atmosphere is ordinary, and the dramatic movement is slower than continental drift."

London (2005)

- Jessica Biel

- Kelli Garner

- Joy Bryant

Snuff-Movie (2005)

- Lisa Enos

- Teri Harrison

Notes and collages