Get Those Stars Out Of Your Eyes

The life of a struggling actor cannot be fun. You spend countless hours preparing for auditions that last all of 60 seconds, not to mention all the time in between you utilize hunting for decent open calls or working out to stay camera-ready. All this when there are thousands of men and women just like you maintaining the same exact regime.

No thanks.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that Starry Eyes was crowd funded through Kickstarter. Considering the amount of hopeful screen stars out there, this is a horror film with a very understandable hook.

It’s also quite good.

Quick Plot: Sarah is a struggling actress trying her best to land a film role. In between unsuccessful soul-sucking auditions, she makes a living at a sad little Hooters knock-off burger joint (run by indie horror film uncle Pat Healy) and makes some misery tolerating her awful neighbors (all like-minded Hollywood wannabes) in a Melrose Place-like apartment complex. Even with indie horror champs Amanda Fuller (Red White & Blue) and Noah Segan (Cabin Fever 2, Deadgirl, everything else) in the mix, these are pretty terrible people.

As per her usual day, Sarah attends an open audition for the lead role in a new horror film made by the fictional, thinly veiled Hammer Studio Astraeus Pictures. 

Angry at herself for a mediocre performance, Sarah escapes to the bathroom where she does a sort of self-abuse ritual, screaming and yanking out her hair with disciplined pain. Oddly enough, such antics are exactly what the casting agents (among them another RW&B alumnus, Marc Senter) are looking for in their ingenue.

Callbacks ensue, and it doesn't take too many flashes of pentagram necklaces to tell us that Astraeus Pictures is probably far more evil than Paramount.

Written and directed by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, Starry Eyes is a strong one-woman show with the wonderful Alexandra Essoe turning in a fantastic performance. Sarah isn't the most lovable of leading ladies, but that ultimately works in the favor of Starry Eyes. It's far more interesting, in 2015, to center your film on an active and determined woman over a passively innocent final girl.

In some ways, Starry Eyes calls to mind Ti West's The House of the Devil. Both films keep the entire focus on an unlucky brunette finding herself in collusion with a satanic cult (as so happens to us brunettes) and both follow an unusually slow pace towards a pretty intense conclusion. 

Also, I really dig both.

There's something genuinely fresh about Starry Eyes. Like a few recent indie horror films (Contracted and Alyce Kills come to mind), this is a film unafraid to let its female lead make unhealthy and selfish decisions. It’s clear to us (and Sarah) that Astraeus Pictures is an evil entity but you know...they’re offering her a key gateway part into the Hollywood Machine. Starry Eyes justifies Sarah's questionable choices even when we as the audience wince as she makes them.

It culminates in an incredibly violent and unsettling finale well worth the somewhat slow build. Best of all, the moral ambiguity may lead to different conclusions over whether Starry Nights has a happy or unfortunate ending. Either way, it’s a superb ride.

High Points

Essoe really does serve as the film's ace, but there's also some excellent tone-setting done by the musical score, which puts a simple but effective theme to outstanding use

Low Points

I suppose I could be irked by feeling as though the movie ends just at the point where most would  want to see follow-through, but there's also something incredibly satisfying about Starry Eyes stopping where it does

Lessons Learned

With the right buns, you don’t need pockets

Van mattresses are surprisingly comfortable

Burial does wonders for the complexion

Rent/Bury/Buy

I found Starry Eyes to be an incredibly interesting little horror film, though I'm sure there are those out there that will be annoyed by its slow pace and 'unlikable' heroine. It's not a perfect effort, but it definitely pulls together the right elements--strong lead performance, fun genre cameos, effective musical score, visceral violence--to serve as a pretty darn impacting 100 minutes of Netflix streaming. Give it a go.

In Honor of Flag Day, Let's Do This:

So here’s the thing: I can’t really discuss today’s feature, 2010’s Red White & Blue without revealing a major plot point that emerges nearly one hour in. If you haven’t seen the film--and I do recommend it, providing you ‘enjoy’ similarly mean and complex horror along the lines of Jack Ketchum--then I would urge you to admire this photo of an adorable puppy carrying an American flag--

And now leave.


All others, here goes:


Quick Plot: Erica (a hauntingly straightforward Amanda Fuller) works menial manual labor jobs during the day while prowling cheap bars when the sun goes down. With white cowgirl boots riding high, the pretty enough redhead beds a man (or three) each night, never repeating herself or lingering for a morning spooning. She mysteriously draws the line (and closes her legs) at Nate, a war veteran and former interrogator now slumming away at a hardware store and boarding house.

Nate is played by British actor Noah Taylor, something you might not believe until IMDB tells you so. With a wiry black beard and loaded Texas drawl, the actor formerly known (to me) as Charlie Bucket’s dad or the Exposition Deliverer in Vanilla Sky disappears into the role of a self-aware sociopath with a mushy soft spot for the cold Erica.

A hesitant courtship follows, cutting off just at a point where it seems our mismatched would-be lovers might get serious. The film switches to the point-of-view of Frankie (The Lost’s Marc Senter), an almost maybe kinda successful rocker balancing a busboy job with his band’s upcoming tour and mother’s cancer treatment. The switch is odd, but not unreasonable; we should remember Frankie as one of the three men who picked up Erica in the opening scene.

In case you didn’t read my intro or decided to take a gamble (much like a few key characters in Red White & Blue), I’m about to get spoilery. Walk away kids. Walk. A. Way.

Frankie gets some bad news in the form of an HIV positive diagnosis, a double whammy since he’s been donating blood to his mother. He concludes--and we an the audience can *almost* be sure--that his one night of unprotected sex with Erica is to blame. Upon dragging her to his basement, it’s more or less confirmed. Erica was raped as a young girl and has essentially spent her life apathetically spreading her disease to any male irresponsible enough to blow his chances on a few hours of condomless sex with a stranger.

What to make of that? What Erica is doing is akin to murder, something made all the more powerful when we see the snowball effects that poisons Frankie’s innocent mother (wonderfully played by Sally Jackson). At the same time, Frankie made his own choice, playing Russian Roulette with his penis. It’s a risk people are taking every day.


Oh but the film doesn’t end there. Come now, this has been dubbed one of the more disturbing films of the year for very different reasons than moral quandaries. Frankie holds onto Erica for a night, creepily seducing her and making a doomed marriage proposal. It does not end well.


Once Nate discovers Erica’s fate, things get...bad. Families are slaughtered. New uses for deadly duct tape are discovered. Stab wounds juiced. It’s ugly. It’s senseless. It’s a nihilistic roller coaster that ends with pure hell.

Hugging your pound puppy yet? Feel like you learned anything about humanity, America, sexual responsibility or vengeance? I can’t say that I have. Part of me wants to roll my eyes at Red White & Blue’s pretentiousness, balk at its self-important title and passive aggressive attempt at linking everything from the Iraq War to revenge-fueled beheadings.

Red White & Blue IS pretentious, but it’s also quite fascinating as both a film and moral question asker. The three lead actors are excellent, giving vanity-free and layered performances that don’t let their characters off the hook. Though the score occasionally oversteps its place, it’s generally well-done with a sound entirely of its own. I don’t quite know how Red White & Blue was supposed to make me feel, but during its running time, I didn’t want to think about anything else and now that it’s over, it’s still there. While that's not necessarily the sign of an enjoyable film, it does make it worth watching for a certain type of viewer.


High Points
Credit must also go to the look of the film, in particular, its actual characters. Fuller is an attractive young actress, but the film is smart enough to let her look natural, patchy skin and all. It’s refreshing to believe our characters as real people, something too many films are too terrified to try

Low Points
As I said, the soundtrack does become a tad obtrusive at times


Lessons Learned
Never send a diner burger back to a Texas kitchen


When bound to a chair with your family’s life hanging in your voice, listen to the crazed war veteran asking you questions and for goodness sake, answer them 

Condoms people. Condoms.


Rent/Bury/Buy
Red White & Blue is currently streaming on Neflix and is certainly worth a thoughtful viewing, providing you enjoy complicated and brutal horror that tries to/might be socially important. I’m still not entirely sure where I fall, but I’m glad I watched the film and look forward to eventually revisiting it with a director commentary track. It does make me curious to seek out filmmaker Simon Rumley’s other work, including the also-Instant Watch The Living and the Dead. I like his ambition and directorial guts.


Now let's forget our problems with another helping of flag puppies: