Charming Billy
Pity poor Charming Billy. He's a video-store manager in some American rural
hellhole. He keeps having flashbacks to when he was a toddler and a woman
hanging rows of white sheets out to dry sang "Billy Boy" to him in a Russian
accent. Now his parents are grotesque, his sympathetic grandpa has had a
stroke, and his mediocre fiancée is pregnant. What else to do but climb
a watertower on an out-of-the-way road and pick off motorists with a
high-powered hunting rifle?
Immediately erasing memories of Peter Bogdanovich's excellent Targets,
this low-budget independent film is a flat, dopy, treadmill stroll through
portentous weirdness that plays more like a heavy-handed, unintentional tribute
to S.F. Brownrigg (Don't Look in the Basement, Keep My Grave
Open). Director William R. Pace has a basic level of technical prowess but
is absolutely tone-dead with actors and dialogue. If you like your wallows in
negativity mealy-mouthed and resentful, here you go. Screens Thursday, September 14th at 11
a.m. and 1:30 and 4 p.m.
-- Chris Fujiwara
Film Festival Feature Films
|
A Fight to the Finish: Stories of Polio |
A Man is Mostly Water |
A Trial in Prague |
Blessed Art Thou |
Charming Billy |
Enemies of Laughter |
Enlightenment Guaranteed |
The Exorcist |
Harry, He's Here to Help |
Into the Arms of Strangers |
Just Looking |
Ratcatcher |
Seven Girlfriends |
Two Family House |
The Yards |
You Can Count On Me |
|