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DIRECTED BY: Zachary Winston Snygg

FEATURING: Zachary Winston Snygg, Amy Lynn Baxter, John Paul Fedele, Carl Burrows

PLOT: When terminally dweeby patsy Jack lands in jail after getting caught up in a drug deal gone bad, he emerges from prison determined to seek revenge on those who hung him out to dry, including his hot girlfriend.

COMMENTS: It’s hard to overstate the impact that Quentin Tarantino’s one-two punch of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had on the film world, especially to indie moviemakers who were looking for a seat at the table. While horror has always been a good entry point into the business, the genre elements and risks from too-effective shocks and gore would sometimes keep talented directors and screenwriters waiting at the kids’ table. Tarantino offered another way in: high-impact violence, often outrageous in nature, supported by snappy, adventurous, reference-laden dialogue that invigorated actors and thrilled audiences. This turned out to be such a successful formula that cinemas were soon inundated with low-budget, microbudget, and even no-budget copycats that checked boxes for gunplay, smug smuttiness, and a deluge of word vomit without any of the original’s flavor or depth. (To be fair, one of the perpetrators of this unfortunate trend was Quentin Tarantino.) 

This is how we come to Blood, Bullets, Buffoons, a clear debtor to Pulp Fiction‘s legacy two years after that film’s release. A true hustler, Snygg has racked up 44 directorial credits to date, many under the name “John Bacchus.” Titles like Lust in Space: The Erotic Witch Project IV,  Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell, and The Heaping Bouncy Breasts That Smothered a Midget that tell you everything you need to know about his auteurial aesthetic. To peruse his IMDb page is to scan a catalog of softcore horror flicks, reality show spoofs, and blockbuster parodies with production values that would make Asylum Entertainment blush with embarrassment. BBB is actually one of his earliest efforts, so if anything, expectations should be kept even lower.

One endeavors to be kind to a production with limited resources. Should it matter that a courtroom looks like someone’s living room has been lightly dressed (right down to the curtains covering the windows behind the judge)? Can we overlook the fact that Jack’s prison houses only two inmates, or that the warden’s office is located in a foyer and is open at all times? Is it worth noting that no one in the entire production can afford a suit, let alone a scene-appropriate costume, and that Jack spends a large portion of the film in the T-shirt and shorts that he might wear to the gym? Honestly, I think we can probably let all that go, because verisimilitude and visual splendor are not really the selling point here. No, what we’re after is… well, it’s all in the title, isn’t it?

This is where the movie falls apart, because while there is a fair amount of cartoonish violence, those first two Bs are not really that present. Instead, there’s a lot a scenes where men talk about their difficulties with women in thick Jersey accents and language that more than hints at an inherent lack of respect. (There’s a charitable interpretation of this as a knock on toxic masculinity, but it is desperately unfunny Z-grade Tarantino jibber-jabber, and frankly reads as a tacit endorsement of said toxic masculinity.) There are also a fair number of scenes where a topless woman is shoehorned into the frame in a wild stab at sex appeal. So perhaps Boorishness, Breasts, Buffoons would be a better title. But the most accurate B would be Boring, because much of the film is given over to long stretches of nothing happening whatsoever. In one scene, for example, Jack goes to a strip club with his posterized portrait of one of the people upon whom he intends to enact revenge. He enters and watches a nearly nude woman writhe around him before she directs him to a topless dominatrix, who extracts ten dollars from the hapless Jack while she is abusing a paying client, before finally getting around to telling him that his target will be here tomorrow at noon. Cost to us: five minutes of unrecoverable life. Uncovered breasts: four. Plot advancement: none at all. Much of the movie is like this. Jack’s pre-crime life, his recruitment into the operation, his time in jail and his daring escape, his plans for revenge and his artful dodging of the police, and all the poorly choreographed action… staged in the longest, least compelling, drawn-out manner possible. 

Snygg hangs most of his film’s potential on the appeal of Penthouse Pet Baxter, who plays the utterly uninterested love interest. Though she is much talked about, her presence is limited almost entirely to some black-and-white flashbacks in which Jack struggles to get her attention, plus a final scene where her character’s arc meets a stupid and pointless conclusion. It seems Snygg can’t even figure out how to use the closest thing he has to a star. He can’t even finagle a topless scene out of her. It’s important not to classify this as poor-man’s Tarantino, because poor men deserve better. Blood, Bullets, Buffoons is depressing, bearing few assets and wasting them anyway. It is strange to see an opportunity like this spoiled in such a cavalier manner. But after all: a buffoon is a clown, a bumbling fool. You can’t say the title was wrong about that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The dialogue is largely sub-Tarantino wannabe nonsense, but the more original ideas, such as staging fights to the soundtracks from kung-fu films, work surprisingly well. There just aren’t enough of them to keep your interest going.” – Jim McLennan, Film Blitz

(This movie was nominated for review by Henry. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

In the Flesh/Blood Bullets Buffoons [DVD]

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