 | MOVIE #1,570 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 04.25.24 ALBERT & AKERMAN: AN AUTEURIST STUDY IN CONTRAST + CONTINUUM From waitress to girl boss: a tale as old as time. Five films into this project, I’ve finally learned that — when it comes to Pyun — you have to throw out all preconceived notions and expectations for both what film is and can be, and what you are wanting and willing to take away from the viewing experience. This is better than its predecessor by sheer virtue that there’s more to look at: shot in and around Mexico City (stand-in for a fictional “San Lucas” along the Gulf — there is a real Cabo San Lucas on the Baja California peninsula, which is needlessly confusing) with plenty of extras, there’s more of a scope and feel here even if the budget was still shoestring. Other than a car explosion at the beginning — the conclusion of an excellent, contained parking garage set-piece — there’s not a ton of notable action scenes, per say. It always feels like one is brimming, however, and I’ll choose to look at the lack of delivery as a feature not a bug, Pyun focusing on the tension rather than the release. |
Just very funny thinking of someone looking up a Sufjan Stevens’ record on Wiki and ending up there.
The cast also includes Pyun mainstays Thom Mathews and Norbert Weisser, alongside a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Courtney Cox and the second-billed Charles Rocket, an ex early years SNL cast member who is best known (to me) as the villain in Dumb and Dumber. Rocket, real name Charles Claverie, sadly committed suicide via slitting his own throat in a field in 2005 at the age of 56. This has inspired at least one conspiracy theory post online (I didn’t have the fortitude to go digging any deeper but that does seem like an odd way to kill yourself)...
What’s funny about that post is that three of the comments on it are people saying, “it’s not that strange, I know someone personally who tried to kill themselves in that way.” WHAT?
Sorry for the digression. Back to Down Twisted, which has an excellent title drop…
This ends with an even more prolonged clip show of highlights from the movie than Vicious Lips, to pad it out by almost ten minutes in front of the overlong end credits. My gut says that this is an inconsequential and probably bad movie, but my heart has a fondness for it. Sure, the premise is dopey and slight to the point of almost being immaterial, but I thought Lowell and Rocket had decent chemistry and it was nice to just hang out in this world via lo-fi video rip for a little over an hour. It also had cool graphics that somehow managed to be both a throwback and very 80s…
With a filmography as vast as Pyun’s, you’re bound to stumble upon more than a couple middling efforts. But I know for a fact that it will get better, and worse, which also could be better (if you know what I mean).
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,569 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,571 ⫸
⫷ MOVIE #1,569 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,571 ⫸
Down Twisted is a 1987 thriller film, directed by Albert Pyun, and starring Carey Lowell, Charles Rocket, Courteney Cox, Norbert Weisser, Linda Kerridge, Trudi Dochtermann and Nicholas Guest. It was released on March 16, 1987.
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