Born Into Mafia

MOVIE #1,299 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 12.27.23 Well I’ve stumbled upon another Neil Breen-level “So Bad It’s Good” auteur: the one and only, Vitaliy Versace. After watching this I realized it was the same guy who made the Twilight rip-off movie that Red Letter Media did a spotlight episode on. But, because I am nothing if not a completionist, I had to start at the beginning (so help me, God). This film has a disgusting 1.3/10 IMDb score, which begs the question: did the idiots who leave reviews on that site go into the picture thinking it might be good? And while it’s anything but (duh), it is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. And that — I swear I’m not trolling — IS something. This is a movie where a different Black actor starts playing a role halfway through so they just shoot him from behind, hoping that the audience won’t notice. But it’s also a movie that features horrible-looking thought bubbles throughout…

Like any true SBIG auteur, Versace also stars as the titular son “born into mafia.” But he tells his dad…


The film starts in “Moscow, Russia” but it’s just a shitty Olive Garden. Versace flees to America, trying to outrun his father’s, and then his uncle’s henchmen. They start killing his new friends (whom he just met!) and even one of his friend’s mom for NO real reason, and then one of his friends kills his uncle, but then it turns out it was all a bad dream? While this lacks the truly bizarre, political and singular vision of someone like Breen, it’s just as nonsensical.

There’s also a romantic subplot wherein (also à la Breen) stock footage is deployed: we see the ocean and bees and flowers intercut with this terrible scene…


I realize I’m referencing Neil Breen A LOT in this review, but I honestly never thought I’d stumble upon a comparable, contemporary filmmaker. And while it does seem like Versace is at least somewhat self-aware IRL (this is probably Breen’s greatest ‘strength’ honestly), he is hitting upon a very specific level and type of bad that is incredibly rare. These movies excel in their badness, transcend their badness in much the same way that an experimental film works. By the ~20th or so scene that utilizes speech bubbles, it doesn’t feel embarrassing or stupid, but deliberate in a mesmerizing way…


And sure, maybe this was just to cover up unusable audio. It’s still A CHOICE. Assessing movies of this ilk can be a tricky business. I’ve tried to be more discerning when it comes to the value of SBIG fare in recent years. It has to be more than simply “look at this idiot who doesn’t know what he’s doing, let’s laugh at him.” In this case, because nearly nothing works (the acting, the editing, the music, and so on), the product on the whole is elevated to a very special place. The movie ends with a time-jump: Versace is married and has a child, his original Black friend is back, and the movie just ends with the slowest credits crawl you'll ever see to pad the run-time out past 70 minutes. This gave me time to reflect on what I just witnessed.

And in this "age of social media," what I saw was clearly greatness, albeit in a very mysterious form.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,298 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,300 ⫸

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A concentrated study of a Russian Mafia family. Vitaliy Versace plays the Russian mafia son, Ivan, runs to America to escape the organized crime curse and start a new life. It was released on July 10, 2007.