Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Mickey Keating
Starring: Angela Trimbur, Chase Williamson, Melora Walters, Keith Kupferer
Writer/director Mickey Keating is known for making films that wear
their influences proudly on their sleeves. Darling is
Keating's take on Roman Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy."
Carnage Park owes much to Peter Watkins'
Punishment Park. His best film,
Offseason, is essentially a reworking of the cult '70s horror masterpiece
Messiah of Evil. His latest, Crooks, is a love letter to Film Noir that eventually takes a left turn into a
Psycho
homage.
The nod to Noir is explicit in the film's early scenes. Shot in silvery
black and white, they have the look of Robert Rodriguez's
Sin City adaptations, taking us into an alternate world that
seems to exist at some uncertain point between the 1940s and the present.
We're introduced immediately to a classic Noir archetype, the sultry
nightclub singer, in Faye (Angela Trimbur). On the very night she
loses her job for standing up to a rowdy drunk, Faye's ex-boyfriend and
former stick-up partner Johnny (Chase Williamson) re-enters her
life with a proposition. He plans to hold up a lucrative poker game run by
a mobster, and wants Faye to help him out.
The resulting fallout of the robbery sees Faye fleeing with the loot
across the MidWest, pursued by a violent hitman known as "the Fixer" (Keith Kupferer). The Fixer has decided to go rogue and wants the loot for himself, and
he'll happily kill anyone who gets in the way.
The Psycho influence emerges when Faye seeks refuge at a
remote diner that doesn't see much business since the highway closed. It's
staffed solely by Blanche (Melora Walters), a nervy waitress who
appears to be hiding a secret.
You can view Crooks either as a derivative cobbling
together of various influences or a fun pastiche of classic genre cinema.
You'd be right in both cases. Initially Keating's film is so obvious in
its homages that we fear we're in for a movie that can't stand on its own.
It's not until Faye arrives at the diner that the movie develops its own
personality, at which point it becomes an intriguing two-hander. Walters
and Trimbur have a prickly chemistry as the two women metaphorically
circle each other like a pair of suspicious cats. There is an almost
homoerotic frisson between the two women. They've both been bad girls, and
they just might get a little badder.
The monochrome of the early urban scenes gives way to full colour when
Faye hits the open road. The credits list two cinematographers -
Mac Fisken and Edgar T. Gómez - and I assume one was
responsible for the black and white scenes while the other handled the
colour portions. Regardless, there is a clear visual distinction between
the two segments of Keating's movie. Beginning in familiar Noir territory,
Crooks segues into something closer to '70s grindhouse fare,
with a splash of Italian crime thrillers for good measure.
There is practically nothing original about Crooks' plot, but Keating paradoxically has a style of his own, and his latest
movie's climax is a beautifully constructed stalking sequence in an open
field. By that point we're watching a completely different picture to the
one that unspooled 70 minutes earlier. This is less a work of originality
and more a filmmaker using narrative cinema to take us on a journey
through some of his favourite cult movies.
