Friday
12Sep2008
Movie Review - 'Netherbeast Incorporated'
Friday, September 12, 2008 at 12:04AM Netherbeast, IncorporatedStarring Darrell Hammond, Steve Burns, and Judd Nelson
Directed by Dean Ronalds
Not Rated
I’m a big believer in turning a
time-honored character or literary motif on its ear. Vampire movies have, over
the course of 100 years, sucked the genre dry, if you’ll pardon the expression.
So when a movie like Russia’s Night Watch blitzes us with incredible
visuals and a unique universe not found elsewhere in vampire literature, it’s
doubly exciting.
The Ronalds Brothers’ feature debut,
Netherbeast
Incorporated, follows that logic and gives bloodsuckers a fresh
new reality. For example, did you know that vampires live and walk among us
everyday, hold down jobs in corporate America and can count President James A.
Garfield among their ranks? It’s true.
Berm-Tech Industries is more or less a
front for a sect of vampires the world would’ve otherwise forgotten. But they’ve
kept themselves going through a communal approach; they work together and all
live in the same building to make sure their numbers, which certainly aren’t
growing in the 21st Century, at least don’t diminish. There’s a
wonderful bit of backstory, in the vein of a corporate training video, used to
explain what Berm-Tech is and how it began. It also demystifies some of what you
think you know about vampires (i.e. they don’t turn into bats).
But the wind in Netherbeast’s
sails is the implied satire that corporate America really is a kind of
bloodsucking scene of likeminded beasts that never see the sun and feeds off
unsuspecting humans. Credit writer
Bruce Dellis for the clever script (based on
his short film, Netherbeast of Berm-Tech Industries) and the team of
Brian
and Dean
Ronalds for finding ways to keep the obvious corporate comparisons
subtle and the particular circumstances and characters of Netherbeast
front and center.
Though the project is a joyously
independent affair, there are plenty of familiar faces, featuring Darrell
Hammond, Dave Foley, Jason Mewes, Steve Burns from Blue’s Clues, and Judd
Nelson. I won’t spoil the fun of spotting Robert Wagner.
The film is not perfect, struggling
with those things sub-million-dollar projects always seem to. An extra ten days
to shoot or $20,000 more in the hopper would probably go miles on a project like
this. But Netherbeast Incorporated is clearly its own film. It has a
refreshing perspective on a genre gone flat, a foreboding sense of humor, if
such a thing exists.
Reader Comments