FILM REVIEW: BLACK WAKE

 
Somebody reckoned that this idea looked good on paper, and I must admit that I thought the same when I read the distributors blurb. We are in low-budget territory here, that’s nothing new with independent filmmakers and so one has to expect somewhat lower standards than major movie companies have. It’s also expected that the quality of talent may not be top-notch, and the industry is full of people using friends and family as extras in their films, but when the ‘star’ of the film, Nana Gouvea, is a totally wooden ‘actress’ who also happens to be the Producer’s wife, you just know that there are barrels laying around with the bottoms scraped out. It’s nepotism at its worst.

For purely practical reasons I often dictate the review as I watch the film, it saves me a lot of time because following the dictation all I will need to do is to come back to this and edit it. A similar process usually happens in filmmaking, where the ‘rushes’ from that day get reviewed, which I can only assume didn’t occur with Black Wake. My reason for saying that is simply that even 12 minutes into this film it is already a tedious mess of poor protracted dialogue, bad pacing and unnecessary scenes.

Tom Sizemore, once a reliable backup for tough guy roles in many big Hollywood movies, does his best with a lacklustre script, although to be honest his acting these days isn’t up to scratch, even so, he still manages to elevate a few of his scenes in a dire film with his presence. Under normal circumstances an actor with the quality of Sizemore’s back catalogue wouldn’t be working in films like this, but alcohol and drug abuse have clearly taken their toll and his history of violence against women is similarly intolerable so my bet is that he’s glad of any work he can get. He has worked with Carlos Keyes before on the films Blood Circus and Killer Response (both of which, not surprisingly, star Nana Gouvea). However, exactly how long they will continue to work with Sizemore is debatable in the wake of this month’s allegations of him molesting an 11-year-old girl.

Regarding Nana Gouvea, in less than 20 minutes she has already proven her ability to overact into a web cam, it is also unfortunate that much of what I’ve seen so far is exposition from her character in streams of badly delivered dialogue. Her facial expressions are often at odds with what she is saying and considering that much of this film (in its entirety) is her talking, that’s not good.

Over the 20 minute stage and Eric Roberts makes his first appearance, now Eric Roberts has also had a heavyweight career, although a mixture of heavy cocaine use and a disfiguring car crash, both in the 80s, altered his trajectory. He has a reputation these days for never turning down a project with 74 movies in the bag last year alone. I will go on record here as being an Eric Roberts fan, I think he is capable of much better things than walk on parts in rubbish like Black Wake. I hope there will come a time when he gets that second bite of the cherry and can leave B-Movies behind, but for the time being he’s doing stuff like this, and that might well be good for him financially, but it’s bad for the rest of the cast as they all look far worse next to someone who can actually act.

From the distributor blurb:

“It has screened at festivals across the world, winning Best Horror Feature Film at the 2018 Phillip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival, Best Special Effects and Best Kill at the Independent Horror Movie Awards 2018 and the Special Jury Award at Brazil International Film Festival 2018.”

Maybe it’s just me; I’m always fascinated when something as bad as Black Wake wins awards. It makes me question the credibility of the awards to the point where I actually bother to research them to see if they have any validity. The Philip K Dick film Festival awards are in the sixth year, so perhaps not enough word is out for them to be sent good quality movies, I will give it the benefit of the doubt. The two awards from the Brazil international film festival seem hollow considering the somewhat limited field, so in my opinion, and it is only my opinion, I don’t see the awards as been that big a deal on the international forum. Sounds good for publicity reasons, just not a true indicator of any quality.

An hour into this is and it is finally getting better, for a film alluding to Lovecraftian darkness it’s taken its own sweet time getting anywhere near that, we now have scorpion-like bugs, uninspired zombies and a largely unseen monstrous mind-controlling shape in the sea, but still we monstly have Nana Gouvea mugging to the camera and explaining shit that we should be being shown to the point where I am now sick of the sight of her.

1:18 and we actually see what (some of) the shape is and then the end credits with the only part of the film worth watching, the mass of out-takes in the end credits.

To say that I didn’t enjoy this film is an understatement. To give you some idea of just how thrilling it wasn’t I started watching it three and a half hours ago and thanks to it being so boring for the first hour I was able to leave it every ten minutes or so and go do something more enjoyable such as emptying the bins, cooking and eating my lunch, doing the washing up, putting laundry in the machine, hell, I would even have de-wormed the cat except that I don’t have a cat. Anything would have been more enjoyable than… Ah fuck, I can’t even remember the name of this pile of shite now… THAT’s how good it is. Black Wake, that’s it, it’s called…. ZZZZzzzzzzzzzz

Having finished it I can only assume that those who give awards have probably watched the last ten minutes and assumed that’s representative of the whole, something like that anyway. Needless to say, I can’t recommend it.

BOOK REVIEW: VIDEO NIGHT BY ADAM CESARE