Stuck

Brandi (Mena Suvari) has been out partying and enjoying herself. Meanwhile, Thomas (Stephen Rea) is not having a good day. He's lost his job and just been evicted, still it could be worse...

Brandi, driving home after too much booze and some substance abuse crashes into Thomas. In a panic she drives home, with Thomas jammed in the windscreen, only to find out when she gets home that he's still alive.

This is an entertaining thriller that delivers something new with an original story and some great moments that will make you cringe and sometimes even laugh at the same time...a dog trying to gnaw on the protruding bones of your shattered legs being a good case in point.

I came across this film completely by accident of course, but it's amazing what you can find on the internet, and I was reluctant to get it at first, because I knew it would be pretty grim, except it sounded fascinating and I wanted to see Mena Suvari in action. What I got was a damn clever thriller that was based on a true story, which doesn't actually surprise me. And they say that truth is stranger than fiction!! Not in this case, it's not. Apparently, in the real life incident, the driver was prosecuted, but I don't know what happened to the victim. In the film, that was hardly going to happen. It was played out with extreme dark humour, (reminded me of the satirical bite of Robocop actually), and I thought Stephen Rea was extraordinary as the man who is 'stuck' in the windscreen. What amazing effects and it didn't even feel far fetched either. It wasn't anyway, since it was based on fact.
What starts off as a grim story about an accident, delves into what really can happen when you refuse to face consequences of actions which you know will land you in trouble. And Mena Suvari was outstanding as the nurse who has one moment of carelessness which changes her life, but it was the nuances in her character as the film goes on that were impressive. Imagine a nurse who discovers a rather darker side to her nature and her psyche goes through a major change. A nurse!! Ironic in itself. And look out for the scene when she goes a bit crazy when she catches her boyfriend with another girl, and she turns violent!! She starts out being the scared woman who's done something awful, then she turns into a kind of captor, for fear of prosecution (and maybe something else), and she's after a promotion as well. All the stuck man wants is help, but he soon realises that something is very wrong and is forced to help himself, which he actually manages to do, and it becomes a battle for survival. A homeless man really has nothing to lose, so his survival instincts are pretty strong.
It makes for quite grim viewing I suppose, but it certainly has a lot to say about human nature, and it keeps you guessing until the very end. Personally though, I don't think it's quite as grim as many have made it out to be. A car crash itself is grim, but that doesn't mean to say it has to be depressing. I have a copy now and I'm keeping it. Pretty challenging stuff I thought.

The golden age of the exploitation movie was arguably the 1970s, since when this affectionately regarded genre has been on a pretty steady downward slide. The likes of Quantin Tarantino have offered their take on it but haven't stayed strictly true to identity because the Grindhouse movies simply had too big a budget to qualify. Along comes Chicago-born creative horror film director Stuart Gordon who has put his name to such 1980s notables as Re-Animator, From Beyond and Dolls among a number of others not always worthy of mention! On a miniscule budget - and thereby entitling the finished product to warrant 'B' status - he has created a relatively short film at 85 minutes that is actually based on a true story, improbable though it will sound - but then, many exploitation films are based on fact, it's what sparks the idea in the first place. Mena Suvari plays a hard-partying, stressed-out care worker longing for a promotion at the old-peoples home where she works. After a night of drug-taking and general partying, she accidentally hits a homeless man called Thomas who gets stuck in her car's windscreen, indeed it won't spoil anything to mention that he spends the entire length of the film stuck there (hence the title of course). Not wanting to call for emergency services as she is driving under the influence of alcohol and a lot more, Brandi, as she is named, chooses not to get Thomas medical help and instead drives home, parks the car in her garage and leaves him there. Stuck. In her detached state of mind Brandi hopes or expects that Thomas will just die where he is, needless to say he refuses to comply with her wishes! But it is this early part of the story that relates to a basically very similar incident that took place in Texas a few years back, although in that case the driver was arrested and later imprisoned for the crime (whatever such a crime is called).

This is a B movie that reminds me of that time when B movies were actually quite good. It's darkly comic horror, full of jet-black satire yet it's morbid and really quite wince-inducing in places. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly sick and twisted but that's just what lovers of this genre want and expect - so that's just fine by me! Forget about Tarantino and his efforts to re-create the B movie aesthetic in the 21st century, because all of his efforts (Deathproof in particular) have completely missed the point and are an insult to the concept. Stuart Gordon's film however is right on the money - literally, as there was so little of it - and shows QT the way home when it comes to how a B movie really should be made. It's grizzly, it's nasty, it's odd and it's strange and it's really rather enjoyable.