David Gere | Through the Shattered Lens

“His bad day is now your bad day!”

Hey, give it up for 2015’s Buddy Hutchins. No matter what else one might say about this film, that’s a great tag line. It not only captures your attention but it’s also honest about the film. Buddy is having a very bad day. As a matter of fact, Buddy has several bad days. It takes him a while but when he snaps, he makes sure that everyone else has an even worse day. Whoever came up with that line better have gotten a raise.

Unfortunately, the film itself doesn’t really live up to the tag line. Jamie Kennedy plays the title character. Buddy Hutchins used to be a boozer. Now, he’s just a loser. He’s unhappily divorced. He rarely gets to see his young daughter. He owns a dry cleaning store that no one frequents. He can’t even afford to pay his one employee. (“Things are going to pick up!” Buddy says, over and over again.) He’s just learned that the man he thought was his father isn’t actually his father. No one has much respect for Buddy. Not even the cop who is called out whenever Buddy causes a scene in the neighborhood can summon up much sympathy for Buddy. Buddy spends most of the movie wishing that he could get his old band back together. When it becomes obvious that isn’t going to happen, he grabs his chainsaw.

Buddy goes on a rampage. That’s not a surprise. What is a surprise is how long it takes him to do it. As played by Kennedy, Buddy is twitchy and obviously unstable from the minute that we first see him. When the film started, I thought Kennedy was just overacting but, as it progressed, I came to realize that Kennedy was actually very convincing as the type of person who you would dread being stuck in a room with. At times, I worried that Buddy was going to drown in a deepening pool of self-pity. Then again, if that had happened, it wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad thing. It would have saved several lives and it would have also shut him up.

Buddy Hutchins was also released under the title Falling Down Again. There are definite similarities to Falling Down but there’s quite a few differences as well. In Falling Down, Michael Douglas plays a burned-out engineer who snaps on a very hot day in Los Angeles and who is eventually stunned to realize that he is now the “bad guy.” Falling Down‘s D-Fens is not really a sympathetic character but one can still understand what’s happening in his head and mourn the man that once was. In Buddy Hutchins, Buddy is basically a loser who can’t succeed at life because he’s a moron. He doesn’t snap because of the frustrations of everyday life in the big city. He snaps because he’s too much of an idiot to do anything else.

Falling Down is a flawed film but it does at least have the courage of its convictions. It may end on a sad note but it was really the only way the story could end. Buddy Hutchins ends with a twist that doesn’t feel at all earned. The film may end with justice for Buddy but where’s the justice for those of us who just spent 90 minutes watching him?

In this film from 2018 (which is largely made up of “found footage”), authorities are confused by a series of mysterious, beachside deaths. The dead seem to have little to no connection with each other, besides having died near the Atlantic Ocean. Some think that the murders are the result of a cult. However, Dr. Luiza Moreira (Nana Gouvea) is convinced that the death are being caused by some sort of parasite that is transferred from host to host. Her boss (Eric Roberts) doesn’t buy it and he thinks that Dr. Moreira is becoming unhinged in her obsession with her theory. But soon, the streets are full of zombiefied killers, all of whom seem to be determined to reach the ocean.

As for Dr. Moreira, her boss may actually have a point about her behavior. Much of the film is made up footage of Dr. Moreira speaking straight to the camera, explaining her theory and also discussing how everyone that she works with is either too foolish or too in denial to understand that its right. Soon, she almost seems to be taking a bit of joy in just how out-of-control the situation has become. Meanwhile, she finds herself suffering from terrible headaches and occasional hallucinations. Two government agents follow her and watch her every move, ominously talking about how she doesn’t realize what is really happening. When she tries to go to her family to warn them about what is happening, she discovers that the situation is even more extreme than she originally thought.

Black Wake is a low-budget slice of Cthulhu-style horror, one that works because it embraces its low budget and basically tosses in every weird twist and situation that it can come up with. It’s an enjoyably weird movie and, if nothing else, it captures the extent to which some people will go to pretend that there’s nothing strange happening around them. My favorites were the dumbass frat guys who just had to pick up a hitchhiker, despite the fact that she was obviously homicidal and disturbed. One of the frat guys points out that it might not be a good idea to pick up a stranger while there’s a wave of mass murders occurring at the beach, one of his friends rationalizes the decision by saying, “She’s a chick.” Drunk frat boys so desperate to get laid that they’ll risk being murdered? That’s probably the most realistic moment in the entire film.

Eric Roberts appears in three scenes, playing an unsympathetic bureaucrat. (Is there any other type?) He’s not the only actor making a cameo here. Chuck Zito plays a sheriff. Vincent Pastore plays a doctor who memorably says, “Fuck this!” when confronted with the walking dead. And Tom Sizemore has two effective scenes as an unstable homicide detective.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed: