 |
 |
|
|
 |
 |
COMPELLING EVIDENCE
Produced by Juan Amalbert
Written and Directed by Donald Farmer
Edited by J.P. Johnson and David Hills
Director of Photography - Don PlatonRick Stone - Danny Fendley
Michelle Stone - Brigitte Nielson
Dana Fields - Dana Plato
Stephanie Roberts - Melissa Anne MooreDonald Farmer loves B-Movies. He writes about them. He acts in them. He makes them. He makes movies about them. From his work it appears that he enjoys the seedier elements related to low-budget cinema best. It's that love and knowledge that makes his film COMPELLING EVIDENCE so much nasty fun.
CE opens with one of the most dead-on and hilarious action parodies I've seen. Danny Fendley is action star Rick Stone. The dailies for his newest movies have him running through the woods with machine gun in tow. He's just saved the girl from the badguys and is on the run. Bullets are flying all around and he takes one in the arm. Once the pair think they're safe, the girl uses her top to bandage Rick's arm. She's not wearing a bra and soon the two are making love up against a tree. When Rick starts to go down on the woman she is shot in the head.
Like I said, Donald Farmer knows his B-Movies. He's able to condense a good number of action cliches into under two minutes and tell an entire story. You've got to admire that.
The rest of the movie isn't so playful. It's a nasty whodunit without a single admirable character. The world of CE is comprised of money-grubbers, adulterers, and social climbers. One could call these people parasites, but that would be an insult to parasites. Parasites don't have the capacity for rational thought, where the characters in CE know exactly what they're doing and love every backstabbing minute.
Rick Jones is having an affair with Stephanie Roberts. He plans to retire from action movies, leave his wife, Michelle, and run away with his millions to an island with Stephanie. Michelle finds out about the affair through a tabloid television reporter and decides to divorce him taking all his millions. That night Michelle is murdered, and Rick is the prime suspect. His producers use the incident to sell movie tickets and the tabloid reporters exploit the situation to it's fullest. Even Farmer gets in on the nastiness in a cameo roll as a television producer willing to use Jones' life as a sacrificial ratings lamb.
Everything that happens in CE can be linked directly to two things, sex and money. At times Rick believes he's being led around by true love, but it's really his Johnson doing all the thinking. He's the kind of action star who doesn't mind pounding his way through the ladies' bedrooms. He's Don Juan with Schwarzenegger-like tact.
As the tabloid reporter who exposes Rick for the philanderer that he is, is Dana Plato, the "Different Strokes" actress who died two years ago from a drug overdose. There's an eerie ending to the film, that almost feels tacked on, where Rick Jones eulogizes Dana's character and how much the world will miss her. Made years before her real-life death, the scene feels morbidly foreboding of things to come. But in a movie that's really a love letter to b-cinema, it's fitting that Farmer pay his respects to one of his favorite b-actresses.
Everything that Farmer does seems grounded in the varying world of low-budget cinema, and I've never seen anyone have so much fun with it. He' starred in and directed micro-budget efforts such as DIRTY COP, NO DONUT 2 and the upcoming Seduction Cinema release AN EROTIC VAMPIRE IN PARIS. He's been able to wrangle the money to afford actors like "In the Heat of the Night"'s Danny Fendley and Sly's ex-wife Brigitte Nelson, who I'm sure didn't come cheaply. I'm not sure if Farmer would ever want to tackle a film bigger than CE, it would take him out of the world he so clearly loves. With the action in CE all taking place in big-budget Hollywood, it looks like the man doesn't care much for the atmosphere anyway.
Usually I don't care for films where the characters are as so amoral, but Farmer never treats them as anything more than what they are, characters in a movie. He clearly keeps the viewer on the other side of that cinematic wall. It's almost as if he wants the audience to have as much fun watching his films as he had making them