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| Images courtesy of Synapse Films |
While Synapse Films have largely established themselves recently
on the 4K UHD marketplace with such deluxe releases as The Convent and
the standalone discs for the Demons films, they’re not afraid to
occasionally backpedal on older but still dominant home video formats for some
of their grungier less-than-stellar looking offerings. Such is the case of their new two-film
single-DVD set Intensely Independent: The Micro-Budget Films of Blake Eckard
which comprises the backyard home movie independent filmmaker’s most striking
films Bubba Moon Face from 2011 and Coyotes Kill for Fun in
2017. Shot on digital video, both set in
backwoods rural Missouri where feral hillbillies and morally diseased reprobates
roam getting drunk messing with prostitutes and/or getting involved in criminal
activities, though made without any production value to speak of achieve a
lo-fi griminess posited somewhere between the uncompromising roughness of 1970s
New Hollywood and a horror film version of The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia.
With Bubba Moon Face, we’re dumped into the world of desolate
rural Missouri with loser drifter Horton Bucks (Tyler Messner) and his brother
Stanton (Joe Hammerstone) who have reunited for their mother’s funeral. As they while away their time getting drunk
at a bar run by Leslie (Misty Ballew) a young woman Horton sexually assaulted
when she was a minor who now makes extra cash on the side prostituting herself
to barflies, their already queasy coexistence is shaken by the arrival of an on-off
girlfriend of Stanton who brings a baby into the picture claiming he’s the
father. As the child falls into Horton’s
unwanted arms, their scruffy-looking sleazy boozing father Gus (Joe Hanrahan) and
his young mistress reenter their lives as it becomes apparent this baby might
not be Stanton’s after all but part of a scheme cooked up by their crooked
father. Needless to say, it is all
downhill from here.
Fast forward to Coyotes Kill for Fun, a middle-aged
former-schoolteacher now living in the backwoods Sue Anne (Roxanne Rogers)
agrees to shelter an abused mother-mechanic Bev (Arianne Martin) and babysit
her two children from their violent maybe-father Larry (Todd Morten). After giving her co-worker Cliff (Tyler
Messner from Bubba Moon Face) some sexual favors in exchange for
transportation to Sue Anne’s backwoods hideout, they head for her home,
unknowingly setting in motion a revenge-murder plot involving Larry’s psychotic
brother Ed (Todd Morten playing dual roles) who has his own ideas of sorting
the situation out. From here, told
through a cross-cutting fractured narrative design, we watch Ed systematically
murder his way through nearly all of the central characters in this icky sordid
saga.
Grimy, gross and like a midwestern rural jungle full of wild
animals out for themselves ready to kill any and all who stand in their way,
the so-called Eckardsville of Bubba Moon Face and Coyotes Kill for
Fun is a distinctly American Hellscape rarely ever seen onscreen before. With the means or not, Eckard and his
cinematographer Cody Stokes, composer Erling Wold and his cast of friends and
family members have violently sliced open the outer epithelial layer of midwestern
Americana. Full of mercurial threatening
characters largely comprised of white trash, both dramas in spite of the
amateurish acting and production values feel like a world you could pull over
and walk right into accidentally getting out of your car to use the bathroom or
phone. The edge of the cliff to Hell is
right here and its all too easy to slip down its bottomless pit.
While Bubba Moon Face was made on the fly, shot in a
mere five days despite achieving a sense of vastness, Coyotes Kill for Fun was
made in portions over the next few years throughout Missouri, Montana and Los
Angeles. Edited, written, produced and
directed by (and sometimes starring) Blake Eckard, these are the very
definition of a one-man band. Akin to
the proliferation of both Super 8mm and 16mm home movies seen mid-century with
the rise of regional filmmaking, it is outlaw cinema of the new millennia. And yet for all the queasy waters these films
swim in, they’re remarkably well paced and mannered and do quite a bit on the
visual and editorial front without two nickels to rub together for help.
Including an essay booklet penned by Andrew Wyatt and
including a new video interview with indie film titan Jon Jost and his
perspective on the cinema of Blake Eckard, Synapse Films’ single-disc two-film
set is unapologetically rancid yet also surprisingly well navigated by its
backwoods provocateur. The kind of films
you don’t watch for picture or sound quality but rather a snapshot of regional
life and rural worldviews of riff raff just trying to survive like any other
creature, Intensely Independent: The Micro-Budget Films of Blake Eckard are
two taut little iron fisted blurry yucky gems.
A blu-ray wouldn’t have been necessary in this case as upscaling the
footage may also inadvertently take away from both pictures’ perfectly rendered
ugliness. For being made more or less
for free, both movies took yours truly into a stinky festering Hellhole not
enough showers in the world will fully cleanse away. Startlingly scarring for having such
unpolished claws.
--Andrew Kotwicki
