Post by angryfan on Nov 25, 2007 7:18:41 GMT -5
This afternoon while doing some Christmas shopping, I got an urge. I felt a need to watch a bad movie. I wanted one so bad that it was funny, hoping for some kind of MST3K vibe. Well, in the discount bin at FYE, I found just such a film.
So, now I give you a simple review of San Fran Psycho, a 2006 release written and directed by the Quiroz brothers. The title alone isn’t what attracted me, and I’d never heard of the producer/director team before. No, what hooked me was the cast.
The movie stars none other than Joe Estevez, the brother of Martin Sheen. Pretty much he looks and sounds EXACTLY like Martin, only younger and shorter. Listed as the “co-stars” in the film are Jose Rosete as the killer (more on him later) and Todd By God Bridges. Honestly, if it’s a “thriller” and features Willis, I’m honor-bound to pay for the damn thing, right? So, I did.
The movie starts out ominously enough with the killer (he is never given a name in the film) suffocating a woman with a plastic bag. Once she is dead, he calls her a “pig” (a common theme, as he refers to all his victims as such) and begins, for no reason, singing “I left my heart in San Francisco”. He then is shown walking down the street accompanied by a techno song that is so bad it wouldn’t be used in any club anywhere, ever. The walking scene, which accomplishes absolutely nothing, lasts a good five minutes.
We are then introduced to one Detective Bill Culp (Estevez), who is shown making a cup of coffee in his kitchen. The scene then changes to a TV, where Culp is giving a press conference about the murder of a couple. The woman was suffocated and the man stabbed. I, naturally presumed that this was the murder (or part of it) that I’d seen at the open. We then see the killer watching the news and smiling. He then writes a note explaining himself, something about how he’s “forgiven” for what he’s done. The strange, and somewhat comedic part of this is, as he writes the note, he speaks the words out loud in a voice that, honestly, sounds like he’s having phone sex.
Apparently, writing can be even more fun that I thought. Who knew?
We find out shortly the letters (there were two, apparently, along with a third murder of a prostitute that may have been the one at the open, it is never explained) were delivered to a local reporter by the name of Rita Franco (the hot but horrific Elene Krimitsos) who proceeded to read them on the air, thereby pissing off the cops who wanted to know where she got the info that they hadn’t released.
At this point I should note that Estevez, while having a fantastic voice, has a delivery that would make a first year theater instructor punch him in the face. Take, for example, this line when talking to Rita. “If you don’t tell me (pause) who your sources are (longer dramatic pause) then I (emphasized and with a long pause) and no one in my department (pause) will ever speak to you again”. Honestly, the man makes William Shatner look fluid.
Rita, of course, decides to co-operate with the cops, because she realizes that the killer might be following her. Her delivery of the lines, however, are somehow worse than Estevez’s pauses. She’s not the worst actor in the film by far, but the dialogue from her here sounds like something out of a low-rent 70’s porno. It was good for a laugh, however. Best bit of her concession that she will allow protection and cooperate is that she still refuses to say too much in order to “protect the source” which she’s already admitted is the killer himself.
We then see The Killer on the hunt for victim number four. His tracking methods of the woman he follows are, to say the least amateur at best. He follows her, maybe three feet behind her the whole way, sits within feet of her IN AN EMPTY SUBWAY CAR, yet she never notices that, hey, there’s a weird dude following her. He tails her to her house and, when she opens the door, attacks. He takes her down and she begs him not to hurt her, that she has a family. She, of course, asks him why he’s doing this. Here’s the exchange between killer and victim.
Killer: You have angered me
Victim: I don’t even know you
Killer I don’t know you either, but I want to kill you.
Naturally, he does just that, strangling her with what appears to be the cord form one of those cheap RC cars form the 1980’s. She puts up no resistance to him, makes zero noise has he tries to wrap the cord around her neck, and is dead, literally, in three seconds. Just a bad, bad death scene. Best part, she blinks AFTER he’s “killed” her.
At this point, Rita is at home, with a police officer assigned to watch her. The officer, as it turns out, is none other than Willis himself, known in the film as Officer Eckerley. She brings him coffee, he says something about it being better than his wife’s, and she goes back inside to find another note and the picture from the most recent murder.
As one would expect, she freaks out and calls for Willis, saying that the killer is in the house. Bridges goes in to “search” but does so in the most unconvincing manner. He walks into rooms swinging his gun around in one hand while the other one is just held in the air like a cartoonish traffic cop. Mind you, when he’s swinging the gun, it is held out to his side as he swings it so that, were he to fire, he’d hit someone only if they were next to him and lying on the floor.
Of course, the killer has left by this point, and is back at his home with Rita’s coffee cup, since it made perfect sense to steal it. He is shown sniffing it because, apparently, Folgers is freaking erotic. So much so that he, well, “asphyxiates” his “little killer” to the memory of the coffee scent. I really wish I was kidding. This scene was nearly traumatic in both its stupidity, nonsensical nature, and the creepy facial expressions, not to mention he kept calling out her name while diddling himself. To quote Glen Quagmire, “Eeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwww!”.
In the following moments we meet Barry (Elias Castillo), Rita’s boyfriend. Right off the bat, the guy comes off as a possessive, macho jackass. He also recites lines as if he’s reading form a teleprompter, by far the worst example of “acting” thus far. Barry, as it turns out, is an ex-Marine who, oddly enough, is sporting frosted hair that looks more out of place than David Duke at a Wu Tang concert. He demands that Rita’s police protection be removed because he’s apparently such a bad-ass that he can handle anything. He comes off a suspicious and the detectives agree they need to run a background check on him just in case.
We then cut to the killer, who is examining a shoe-box filled with envelopes, each of which contain murder photos from his crimes. Apparently, though it is never given further details, he’s committed murders in Portland and Seattle as well as the San Francisco area, with pictures from each crime. Strangely, despite the four murders, he only has two pictures from his San Francisco folder. Even discounting the one he left at Rita’s, this still leaves one photo missing. Small detail, I know, but these are the kinds of things that piss me off. He is very pleased, it seems, with his Seattle and Portland photos, going so far as to react much as JR does to Skittles, but the San Francisco photos make him angry for some reason. We then flash to Rita, who mentions, but gives no details, that she’s been stalked in the past. We find out later that she, thanks to martial arts training, kicked the guy’s ass and he subsequently died in prison. Could have been an interesting side-bar, but frankly, it adds nothing to the plot.
Meanwhile, the killer, after being angered by his San Francisco photos, heads out for his fifth kill. This time, he follows a gay couple. One heads off to retrieve his cell phone, which would lead most to believe the one who stays behind is going to die. Interestingly enough, the killer chooses the guy who wanted his phone back, follows him to an elevator in a parking garage, and slits his throat, once again taking a picture. He then heads off to watch Rita’s boyfriend.
Rita, upon finishing her newscast, calls for a ride from Barry. Subsequently, Barry finds another note on the car, this one for the latest killing, and brings it with him to pick up Rita. They call in the detectives and a priest who had examined earlier letters to make some sense of it all.
In what I assume is supposed to be a dramatic scene, the cops decide to fake some letters and go on the news to provoke the killer into making a mistake. On two occasions during this scene Detective Culp refers to the killer as a “cold-blooded psychopath”. This is all well and good, and an apt description, but he uses the exact same inflection and tone of voice each time, and punctuates each use, at the same moment (right as he says psychopath) by punching the table. I think it was meant to look cool or tough, but it looked, honestly, like someone had denied him a cookie.
The go through the news conference with the fake letters, and the killer is shown going completely mental in his apartment. He destroys his TV, then starts crying and screaming “you f***ing liars” over and over again. It should be noted that, for some reason, the director decided to film him screaming this phrase from about 15 different angles, which only serves to make his Super-emo meltdown funnier, as opposed to the “thrill” I think I was supposed to feel. Oddly enough, him calling them liars, once the crying stops, provokes the same reaction that his foray into coffee sniffing did earlier. Once again, eeeeeeewwwwwwwww. He leaves the house, in broad daylight, to kill again.
Rita’s mom calls her, and is reading from cue-cards apparently. In the midst of her concern for her daughter’s safety due to the crimes, her mom takes the time to ask about Rita’s sex life for no apparent reason whatsoever. This is not only confusing, but kinda gross, as she reasons “I tell you about my sex life all the time”. Seriously, are they trying to make me stop watching this? The sex discussion turns to a dinner invite somehow, with her mother asking her to come for dinner at the exact time of her daily live newscast. Sweet crap, who got paid to write this?
In the next scene, the detectives are talking about the case, when Culp receives a phone call. He can’t just answer it, apparently, as he is somehow required to come up with a cool line. His choice? “Just a second, my ass is vibrating”. While cleaning up the pepsi I spit out at that, it is revealed that Rita is calling to ask for an escort to her mother’s home for dinner. It is decided that the “co-star” of the film Todd Bridges, will escort her, making his second appearance in the film.
The killer is then shown walking in front of a car that stops just before hitting him. The driver, angry, screams “hey, man, I almost killed you” to which the killer responds, in a nice line I thought, “almost doesn’t count” before pulling the man from the car and stabbing him to death and stealing the car.
Rita finishes dinner with her mother and leaves, but immediately is called by her mom, telling her that she “left an envelope at the hosue”. She yells at her mother to leave the house because the killer is there, to which her mother responds, with absolutely zero emotion, “oh, allright”. We see Rita driving back from Bridges’ perspective as he follows her, wondering aloud what she’s doing and why she’s going so fast. We then flash to Rita’s mother who, having still not left the house, has apparently read the notes in the script that say to show emotion, so she is completely over the top with it.
Bridges enters the house, of course, and for the second time, upon finding nothing, looks like a complete and utter moron. Poor Willis can’t catch a break and, for the second time, gets reamed for letting someone get in to a house he was guarding specifically against them.
The killer is then seen in the priest’s house, and somehow he has a gun. The priest tells him he’s not a religious man, and the killer, despite how angry he got when it was said on the newscast earlier, agrees with him. What the hell? Why the meltdown if the priest was right? I’m confused. Plot holes are one thing, but Jesus H Christ, this is a plot canyon. Long story short he shoots the priest in the head and what appears to be confetti shoots out the barrel of the gun.
Back at Rita’s house, Barry is adamant that the police protection disappear because “I’m a Marine, I killed Taliban with my bare hands. I could kill those cops myself”. Nice to see he’s not wrapped too tightly. The alarm in the house goes off, of course, meaning the killer is there. Barry says he’s going to go get his gun from the closet but, guess what kids, that’s the gun the killer shot the priest with! So, he conks ol’ Barry on the head and knocks him cold. There’s your bad-ass, people, he got dropped by a bump on the noggin.
The killer confronts Rita, who says she thought he said he wouldn’t hurt her. He responds “I lied” and shoots her in the head, with the head wound magically appearing in her chest somehow. New physics? With Rita dead, the killer heads upstairs and, placing the gun in Barry’s hand, shoots Berry in the head, after going outside and killing the cop who was watching the house. Nice and neat, everything looks like a double murder/suicide. Well, it would be, if it wasn’t the same gun that killed the priest when Barry’s whereabouts were accounted for. Plot holes AGAIN?
Sadly, it’s never explained, as the cops finally run the background check on Barry post-mortem and find out that, not only was he dishonorably discharged for punching an officer, he was convicted of murder as a juvenile. They decide that Barry was the killer all along, ignoring the whole “he couldn’t have killed the priest, he was across town with the cops at the time” thing, and declare the case closed.
The final scene is of the killer hitch-hiking, getting into a car, and telling the driver he’s heading for Pheonix. I’m guessing this was to set up a sequel, but, well, unless some studio exec is very drunk during the pitch, or is bribed with hookers and coke, it will never happen.
Overall, the acting was painfully horrid, the logic sucked, and the dialogue was something that would get you booted from “screenwriting 101” on the first day. Bad, indeed, but well-worth a laugh, if only for the notion that the scent of coffee is an aphrodisiac.
So, now I give you a simple review of San Fran Psycho, a 2006 release written and directed by the Quiroz brothers. The title alone isn’t what attracted me, and I’d never heard of the producer/director team before. No, what hooked me was the cast.
The movie stars none other than Joe Estevez, the brother of Martin Sheen. Pretty much he looks and sounds EXACTLY like Martin, only younger and shorter. Listed as the “co-stars” in the film are Jose Rosete as the killer (more on him later) and Todd By God Bridges. Honestly, if it’s a “thriller” and features Willis, I’m honor-bound to pay for the damn thing, right? So, I did.
The movie starts out ominously enough with the killer (he is never given a name in the film) suffocating a woman with a plastic bag. Once she is dead, he calls her a “pig” (a common theme, as he refers to all his victims as such) and begins, for no reason, singing “I left my heart in San Francisco”. He then is shown walking down the street accompanied by a techno song that is so bad it wouldn’t be used in any club anywhere, ever. The walking scene, which accomplishes absolutely nothing, lasts a good five minutes.
We are then introduced to one Detective Bill Culp (Estevez), who is shown making a cup of coffee in his kitchen. The scene then changes to a TV, where Culp is giving a press conference about the murder of a couple. The woman was suffocated and the man stabbed. I, naturally presumed that this was the murder (or part of it) that I’d seen at the open. We then see the killer watching the news and smiling. He then writes a note explaining himself, something about how he’s “forgiven” for what he’s done. The strange, and somewhat comedic part of this is, as he writes the note, he speaks the words out loud in a voice that, honestly, sounds like he’s having phone sex.
Apparently, writing can be even more fun that I thought. Who knew?
We find out shortly the letters (there were two, apparently, along with a third murder of a prostitute that may have been the one at the open, it is never explained) were delivered to a local reporter by the name of Rita Franco (the hot but horrific Elene Krimitsos) who proceeded to read them on the air, thereby pissing off the cops who wanted to know where she got the info that they hadn’t released.
At this point I should note that Estevez, while having a fantastic voice, has a delivery that would make a first year theater instructor punch him in the face. Take, for example, this line when talking to Rita. “If you don’t tell me (pause) who your sources are (longer dramatic pause) then I (emphasized and with a long pause) and no one in my department (pause) will ever speak to you again”. Honestly, the man makes William Shatner look fluid.
Rita, of course, decides to co-operate with the cops, because she realizes that the killer might be following her. Her delivery of the lines, however, are somehow worse than Estevez’s pauses. She’s not the worst actor in the film by far, but the dialogue from her here sounds like something out of a low-rent 70’s porno. It was good for a laugh, however. Best bit of her concession that she will allow protection and cooperate is that she still refuses to say too much in order to “protect the source” which she’s already admitted is the killer himself.
We then see The Killer on the hunt for victim number four. His tracking methods of the woman he follows are, to say the least amateur at best. He follows her, maybe three feet behind her the whole way, sits within feet of her IN AN EMPTY SUBWAY CAR, yet she never notices that, hey, there’s a weird dude following her. He tails her to her house and, when she opens the door, attacks. He takes her down and she begs him not to hurt her, that she has a family. She, of course, asks him why he’s doing this. Here’s the exchange between killer and victim.
Killer: You have angered me
Victim: I don’t even know you
Killer I don’t know you either, but I want to kill you.
Naturally, he does just that, strangling her with what appears to be the cord form one of those cheap RC cars form the 1980’s. She puts up no resistance to him, makes zero noise has he tries to wrap the cord around her neck, and is dead, literally, in three seconds. Just a bad, bad death scene. Best part, she blinks AFTER he’s “killed” her.
At this point, Rita is at home, with a police officer assigned to watch her. The officer, as it turns out, is none other than Willis himself, known in the film as Officer Eckerley. She brings him coffee, he says something about it being better than his wife’s, and she goes back inside to find another note and the picture from the most recent murder.
As one would expect, she freaks out and calls for Willis, saying that the killer is in the house. Bridges goes in to “search” but does so in the most unconvincing manner. He walks into rooms swinging his gun around in one hand while the other one is just held in the air like a cartoonish traffic cop. Mind you, when he’s swinging the gun, it is held out to his side as he swings it so that, were he to fire, he’d hit someone only if they were next to him and lying on the floor.
Of course, the killer has left by this point, and is back at his home with Rita’s coffee cup, since it made perfect sense to steal it. He is shown sniffing it because, apparently, Folgers is freaking erotic. So much so that he, well, “asphyxiates” his “little killer” to the memory of the coffee scent. I really wish I was kidding. This scene was nearly traumatic in both its stupidity, nonsensical nature, and the creepy facial expressions, not to mention he kept calling out her name while diddling himself. To quote Glen Quagmire, “Eeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwww!”.
In the following moments we meet Barry (Elias Castillo), Rita’s boyfriend. Right off the bat, the guy comes off as a possessive, macho jackass. He also recites lines as if he’s reading form a teleprompter, by far the worst example of “acting” thus far. Barry, as it turns out, is an ex-Marine who, oddly enough, is sporting frosted hair that looks more out of place than David Duke at a Wu Tang concert. He demands that Rita’s police protection be removed because he’s apparently such a bad-ass that he can handle anything. He comes off a suspicious and the detectives agree they need to run a background check on him just in case.
We then cut to the killer, who is examining a shoe-box filled with envelopes, each of which contain murder photos from his crimes. Apparently, though it is never given further details, he’s committed murders in Portland and Seattle as well as the San Francisco area, with pictures from each crime. Strangely, despite the four murders, he only has two pictures from his San Francisco folder. Even discounting the one he left at Rita’s, this still leaves one photo missing. Small detail, I know, but these are the kinds of things that piss me off. He is very pleased, it seems, with his Seattle and Portland photos, going so far as to react much as JR does to Skittles, but the San Francisco photos make him angry for some reason. We then flash to Rita, who mentions, but gives no details, that she’s been stalked in the past. We find out later that she, thanks to martial arts training, kicked the guy’s ass and he subsequently died in prison. Could have been an interesting side-bar, but frankly, it adds nothing to the plot.
Meanwhile, the killer, after being angered by his San Francisco photos, heads out for his fifth kill. This time, he follows a gay couple. One heads off to retrieve his cell phone, which would lead most to believe the one who stays behind is going to die. Interestingly enough, the killer chooses the guy who wanted his phone back, follows him to an elevator in a parking garage, and slits his throat, once again taking a picture. He then heads off to watch Rita’s boyfriend.
Rita, upon finishing her newscast, calls for a ride from Barry. Subsequently, Barry finds another note on the car, this one for the latest killing, and brings it with him to pick up Rita. They call in the detectives and a priest who had examined earlier letters to make some sense of it all.
In what I assume is supposed to be a dramatic scene, the cops decide to fake some letters and go on the news to provoke the killer into making a mistake. On two occasions during this scene Detective Culp refers to the killer as a “cold-blooded psychopath”. This is all well and good, and an apt description, but he uses the exact same inflection and tone of voice each time, and punctuates each use, at the same moment (right as he says psychopath) by punching the table. I think it was meant to look cool or tough, but it looked, honestly, like someone had denied him a cookie.
The go through the news conference with the fake letters, and the killer is shown going completely mental in his apartment. He destroys his TV, then starts crying and screaming “you f***ing liars” over and over again. It should be noted that, for some reason, the director decided to film him screaming this phrase from about 15 different angles, which only serves to make his Super-emo meltdown funnier, as opposed to the “thrill” I think I was supposed to feel. Oddly enough, him calling them liars, once the crying stops, provokes the same reaction that his foray into coffee sniffing did earlier. Once again, eeeeeeewwwwwwwww. He leaves the house, in broad daylight, to kill again.
Rita’s mom calls her, and is reading from cue-cards apparently. In the midst of her concern for her daughter’s safety due to the crimes, her mom takes the time to ask about Rita’s sex life for no apparent reason whatsoever. This is not only confusing, but kinda gross, as she reasons “I tell you about my sex life all the time”. Seriously, are they trying to make me stop watching this? The sex discussion turns to a dinner invite somehow, with her mother asking her to come for dinner at the exact time of her daily live newscast. Sweet crap, who got paid to write this?
In the next scene, the detectives are talking about the case, when Culp receives a phone call. He can’t just answer it, apparently, as he is somehow required to come up with a cool line. His choice? “Just a second, my ass is vibrating”. While cleaning up the pepsi I spit out at that, it is revealed that Rita is calling to ask for an escort to her mother’s home for dinner. It is decided that the “co-star” of the film Todd Bridges, will escort her, making his second appearance in the film.
The killer is then shown walking in front of a car that stops just before hitting him. The driver, angry, screams “hey, man, I almost killed you” to which the killer responds, in a nice line I thought, “almost doesn’t count” before pulling the man from the car and stabbing him to death and stealing the car.
Rita finishes dinner with her mother and leaves, but immediately is called by her mom, telling her that she “left an envelope at the hosue”. She yells at her mother to leave the house because the killer is there, to which her mother responds, with absolutely zero emotion, “oh, allright”. We see Rita driving back from Bridges’ perspective as he follows her, wondering aloud what she’s doing and why she’s going so fast. We then flash to Rita’s mother who, having still not left the house, has apparently read the notes in the script that say to show emotion, so she is completely over the top with it.
Bridges enters the house, of course, and for the second time, upon finding nothing, looks like a complete and utter moron. Poor Willis can’t catch a break and, for the second time, gets reamed for letting someone get in to a house he was guarding specifically against them.
The killer is then seen in the priest’s house, and somehow he has a gun. The priest tells him he’s not a religious man, and the killer, despite how angry he got when it was said on the newscast earlier, agrees with him. What the hell? Why the meltdown if the priest was right? I’m confused. Plot holes are one thing, but Jesus H Christ, this is a plot canyon. Long story short he shoots the priest in the head and what appears to be confetti shoots out the barrel of the gun.
Back at Rita’s house, Barry is adamant that the police protection disappear because “I’m a Marine, I killed Taliban with my bare hands. I could kill those cops myself”. Nice to see he’s not wrapped too tightly. The alarm in the house goes off, of course, meaning the killer is there. Barry says he’s going to go get his gun from the closet but, guess what kids, that’s the gun the killer shot the priest with! So, he conks ol’ Barry on the head and knocks him cold. There’s your bad-ass, people, he got dropped by a bump on the noggin.
The killer confronts Rita, who says she thought he said he wouldn’t hurt her. He responds “I lied” and shoots her in the head, with the head wound magically appearing in her chest somehow. New physics? With Rita dead, the killer heads upstairs and, placing the gun in Barry’s hand, shoots Berry in the head, after going outside and killing the cop who was watching the house. Nice and neat, everything looks like a double murder/suicide. Well, it would be, if it wasn’t the same gun that killed the priest when Barry’s whereabouts were accounted for. Plot holes AGAIN?
Sadly, it’s never explained, as the cops finally run the background check on Barry post-mortem and find out that, not only was he dishonorably discharged for punching an officer, he was convicted of murder as a juvenile. They decide that Barry was the killer all along, ignoring the whole “he couldn’t have killed the priest, he was across town with the cops at the time” thing, and declare the case closed.
The final scene is of the killer hitch-hiking, getting into a car, and telling the driver he’s heading for Pheonix. I’m guessing this was to set up a sequel, but, well, unless some studio exec is very drunk during the pitch, or is bribed with hookers and coke, it will never happen.
Overall, the acting was painfully horrid, the logic sucked, and the dialogue was something that would get you booted from “screenwriting 101” on the first day. Bad, indeed, but well-worth a laugh, if only for the notion that the scent of coffee is an aphrodisiac.
