FILMBRATS - REVIEWS

Katrina Skinner is just your average suburban teenager. That is, if your average suburban teenager is a manipulative, violent, over-sexed sadist. Not that her family is all that average either. Her brother is in prison for murdering a guy that talked back one too many times. Her drug addicted mother has been banned from showing her face. And you know her young son is just bound to turn out great. The only normal one, the unheard voice of reason, is her father. That’s probably why she’s plotting to have him killed.

Remember how “American Beauty” started out with the daughter being interviewed on camera talking about potentially killing her father, and then we go back to see the story play out? Well, this starts off virtually the same way, except this time the daughter’s being interviewed by a reporter and the deed has already been done. And they keep cutting back to various characters being interviewed. And it’s not nearly as good. Really the only purposes of the news report are to shorten the story by small increments and to pretend like the story is more interesting than it actually is. Sure the event might be news-worthy, but not to the near documentary level/length that we’re given.

The story and script are pretty standard fare. Written by young upstart Alice Bell, the film is able to interject enough life into her characters to keep you in your seat. No one here is particularly outstanding either as an actor (although Emily Barclay as Katrina tries really hard to be amazing) or as a character study, and you quickly get the feeling you’ve seen very similar people and situations several times before. It’s also pretty hard to connect with any of them (not even with the father, because he was too frustrating). Not only are they largely despicable people, but you never get the sense that there is a normal human side to them, nor do you ever really see a good motivation for how they got to be that way.

Music video director Paul Goldman tries to give the film a little visual flair, especially near the start. Unfortunately, it’s just a thinly veiled attempt to show off, while (sub?) consciously acknowledging his feature needs a whole lot of spicing up. Somewhere amidst the pretty lame attempts at being funny, and the poser rock soundtrack, I could tell early on that it wasn’t going to go anywhere especially entertaining. Give it a look if you’re into the suburban mundane.

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