ZERO STARS/****
written and directed by Drew Barnhardt
by Walter Chaw Hypehante Drew Barnhardt’s sophomore feature Rondo is vile, amateurish garbage that fails largely because it’s so pleased with itself. It features narration ripped off in style and intent from Todd Field’s Little Children, of all things, giving its set-up a kind of arch distance, but what begins as moderately clever reveals itself to be a desperate way to provide exposition when dialogue, character work, and camera movement have failed. Rondo follows Boone (Grant Benjamin Leibowitz), a junkie crashing on his sister Jill’s (Breanna Otts) couch, visiting a sex party presided over by Lurdell (Reggie De Morton), who carefully enunciates his Pornhub-menu monologue to the participants before it’s revealed that this sex party is, wait for it, actually a murder party. Jill gets involved. Jill and Boone’s former vet dad (Michael Vasicek) gets involved, albeit briefly. And then there’s some crap cribbed from that old Tom Savini book about doing gore effects on the cheap before Jill strips down to her underwear and starts acting like one of those models in an NRA video. Rondo is a particularly low form of exploitation that asks two different women to talk about fetishes before being summarily objectified, murders two women in particularly fetishized ways, and pushes the proposition that black men are violent and scary. It might want to argue that having one of the scary black men married to a white woman alleviates that charge–except that said white woman is psychotic. That it’s poor in every technical regard (add the editing, which renders the physics of a bathtub murder nonsensical) is no crime in and of itself; the real problem is the movie’s aggressive no-nothing attitudes towards what it’s putting in front of an audience. It will argue that it has nothing to say and means only to entertain–which, nowadays especially, is a red flag to pay very close attention to what it’s saying. Dispiriting, enervating stuff. Fantasia Fest 2018 – Programme: Fantasia Underground
