The Scarlet Worm: Finally! Wild Dogs in mass-release! Longtime fans had a lot to get salivating over: Fredianelli free from starring and cinematography and able to focus on directing, Lambert writing (after his wildly successful two previous outings with Fredianelli), Stielstra starring, special guest stars, and a solid, sordid grindhouse set-up. Everything was in the right place, but with all of these elements, the final product ends up feeling a bit too restrained, a bit too tame to live up to its premise and the promise of all involved. If the earlier Fredianelli efforts sometimes felt a bit slapped-together or a bit rough around the edges, this effort feels a bit too pretty and concerned with professionalism (a gambit that seems to have paid off in some ways). A perfect point of comparison is A Habitation of Devils, Lambert's previous collaboration with Fredianelli. That movie is super rough around the edges, with a script that barely manages to bounce between generic stereotypes and digital video cinematography sometimes so underlit to the point of indiscernibility. However, it manages these hiccups due to a sense of what, for lack of better terms, I'll call "going for it." This same "going for it" mentality is all over other WD pics like The Minstrel Killer and even the recent Apocrypha. Why then does even Stielstra, normally a maniac when facing the camera, play it so cool? Why can't the genre kings (Fredianelli and Lambert) deliver on some of their promises? Why does Print have a reputation for being such a dirty bastard and such a merciless killer but never show us why? Why can't we see what makes his work such poetry to him (as he says over and over and over again)? Even the flick's abortion subtext feels pretty inoffensive and tame (unexpected, consider the distributor Unearthed Films, generally known for stuff like the Guinea Pig and Slaughtered Vomit Dolls). Money was well-placed to grab Dan van Husen, who provides most of the flick's best scenes, but even his work and the (as- expected) excellent shoot-outs feel bogged down by a laborious execution of the basic genre steps. There is a nice father-son dynamic between van Husen and Stielstra, but even that seems to too frequently be displaced in favor of other beats and concerns. I wanted to love this one so much, but in the end, I just can't find as much to love about it as in the cast and crew's other various projects.
