Dungeon Girl

(2008, 81 min) Ulli Lommel's Dungeon Girl isn't so much a horror film (and definitely not a torture porn) as an exploration of the relationship between captor and captive. Well not so much that as a half-baked student film from one of the worst directors of all time. It's almost as if instead of a script, Lommel puts together three half-developed ideas and then edits them together with all the glee of a sophomore film major playing with After Effects for the first time while tripping balls. Even when it comes to nudity, usually Lommel's saving grace in the other stinking piles of garbage he's hurled at the world, he falls short giving viewers hoping for skin more male nudity than female with one recurring shot of Wendi Jean Linn's buttocks and another recurring image of an anonymous woman tied up on a cross wearing rags which are sliced to reveal her naked breasts and, pehaps, a glimpse at her bush. Linn is certainly an absolutely stunning creature and the exploitative pretense is almost a work of art on its own, but Dungeon Girl fails on almost every conceivable level.

– Rick Stanko

© TLA Entertainment Group

As Seen Through These Eyes

Reviewed at the 2008 Palm Springs International Film Festival

(2008, 70 min) So poorly put-together that it actually serves to trivialize the holocaust, this weak documentary is a real waste of its noble and intriguing subjects.

During the Holocaust, the Nazis did their damndest to keep their prisoners (whether in concentration camps or ghettos) in line, including the suppression of all art that wasn't directly related to German propaganda. But as with all oppressive societies, a noble few rebelled, and some of this art survived, with or without the lives of their creators.

The focus is supposed to be on the artwork created by prisoners of the Holocaust, but director Hilary Helstein never shows us a complete image, only fragments, Ken Burns style. Her attempt to break up the static talking heads serves to deny us the full scale of the art; to me, it felt disrespectful to the people who risked (and sacrificed) their lives creating, hiding and preserving the work. Some pieces seemed breathtaking, and others amateurish yet powerful expressions of subversion, but it's hard to tell when all we're offered is fragments. The heavily pixellated digital projection doesn't help; its quality could improve when shown on the Sundance Channel or on DVD.

Maya Angelou narrates with the most purple of prose, as if anything Holocaust related needed to be overstated: "Now instead of capturing beautiful landscapes, Hitler captured people." "The musicians were cruelly forced to play upbeat marches in order to drown out the screams of the prisoners." Did the legendary poet even know what she was reading? The score is likewise overbearing, obvious and intrusive. The real tragedy is that the remaining survivors are so old, this might have been their last chance to tell their stories. What a shame.

– David Gorgos

© TLA Entertainment Group

Aces

Ed note: The World Series of Poker final table coverage begins this week on ESPN. Yeah, we know who won, but we're still excited about watching all the action. For the next week we'll revisit our reviews of poker in cinema. Or in this case, direct-to-video crap.

(2006, 89 min) A horrible quickie aimed at cashing in on the poker craze, taking all the worst elements of Rounders to create an interminable 90 minutes of pokerbabble. Three young women, fresh out of college, come up with a poker cheating scheme that's about 40 years old and would never work. It does work for a while, but when they're caught, two of the girls are held hostage by a crazy Johnny Chan lookalike, and the poker neophyte must prove her worth (without cheating) to set everything right. WhatEVER!

These actresses make Pia Zadora look Oscar-worthy, and it doesn't help that they're alternately spouting the most basic cliches and the most banal (and cryptic) poker idioms. One of them even has to go over the rules of Texas Hold 'em for the audience — can you imagine Field of Dreams beginning with an overview of the rules of baseball? By the way, don't be fooled by the "unrated" tag on the cover; the production was too cheap to go to the MPAA for a rating, and the one brief topless scene (strip poker, natch) is incredibly tame.

– David Gorgos

© TLA Entertainment Group