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LIVE FEED
LIVE FEED starts off with a few minutes of five friends walking around enjoying themselves inter-cut with an all-nude stripper doing her thing in front of a high class Japanese man. When the man gets through watching the stripper, he goes over to another strip pole, this time with a young man strapped to it. It turns out the high class man is Yakuza, a ruthless crime lord and wants information from the young man. The young man will not give in, so the Yakuza leader blow torches his face.
Produced and Directed by Ryan Nicholson
Written by Roy Nicholson and Ryan Nicholson
Edited by Vince D'Amato
Director of Phography - Sasha PopovEmily - Taayla Markell
The Boss - Stephen Chang
Miles - Kevan Ohtsji
Darren - Rob Scattergood
Sarah - Ashley Schappert
This is about as subtle as Ryan Nicholson-s gore cum xenophobe film LIVE FEED gets throughout its running time.
Although the comparisons to Eli Roth?s HOSTEL are inevitable, I do believe LIVE FEED was its own film before HOSTEL was announced. Regardless of that, both are similar in story in that a group of people travel to a foreign place and end up getting mutilated in a bloody fashion.
I will be up front and say HOSTEL works, and LIVE FEED doesn't.
Some might disagree with me, but I thought HOSTEL was a well made, graphic, and an extremely suspenseful film that worked on all levels. Feeding off natural xenophobic fears everyone has, HOSTEL took us to a comfortable place we all know because of its brownies and red light district, Amsterdam. We get to have fun with his characters before Roth yanks the rug out from under us, and leaves us stranded in a land where we don't know the people or customs. Most horror films play off xenophobia, or fear of foreign places, but we are never sure where LIVE FEED takes place. It would seem somewhere in Japan as the majority of the secondary cast is supposed to be Japanese, and the lead villains are Yakuza. But at the same time Japanese characters speak English, very well in fact, and use American dollars. Could this be Chinatown?
LIVE FEED wants to work on the same level as HOSTEL, it seems, but the story is sloppy and the characters are poorly written. While HOSTEL had its sleaze at times before it changed to full-out gore, LIVE FEED is sleaze the whole way through. It's a gore film that takes place in a porn theater. The idea is fantastic, in a sick 80's Italian way, but the execution just doesn't work. For whatever reason the five friends decide they need to "get intimate", so they go to a porn theater??? Why not just go back to the Hotel they were staying at? It is as if Nicholson had found this grotesque location and decided no matter how much sense it lacks, the group must go in there and get tortured.
When the slaughter starts, we get the requisite graphic bloodletting. But the problem is the make-up effects are much like the storyline-sloppy. That's not saying the gore is cheap, but being that Nicholson is a fantastic prosthetic artist I was expecting more from him. What we get though is basic, bloody deaths that really lack originality. The one death of the film that stands out is the tube and snake scene, which is truly a disturbing sight to behold. If Nicholson had created more deaths in that mold, it would be easier to forgive the film of run-of-the-mill gore. Sadly though, we are left with basic gore and some nice high-pressure blood sprays that sadly are edited choppy, lessening their effect.
It is hard for me to say I didn't like LIVE FEED, but it fails at delivering any tension or characters we care about. It is better than much of the garbage out on the video shelves today, but it just doesn't deliver the goods as I had hoped. It is a shame as Ryan Nicholson is a gore fan through and through. I hope he keeps getting the money to fund his films, but next time he should spend a little more time fleshing out the characters and setting up his locations before killing his cast off.
Review written by Gordon Loving, 2/07