1996, United States. Starring Rick Montana, Dave Friedman, Connie Miller, Kimberly Lynn Cole. Directed by Rick Montana

Let's get something straight right off the bat: in my opinion, when you call your movie Redneck Revenge, you're establishing very high expectations. Your movie should have rednecks, and it should have some revenge, and with such a title communicating both low-brow sleaze and violence, you should also have some nudity and probably some car chases where a cop car flips over or jumps through the open doors of a box car on a moving freight train. You know, cool Southern stuff. Being Southerners, both Scott and I demand a lot from our hicksploitation films.

And let's face it -- we're talking in relative terms here. It's not that hard to make a passable hicksploitation film. You churn out a script revolving around either a lone lawman fighting small town corruption or an ex-con who is trying to resist returning to a life of crime, yet gets pressured into breaking the law by small town corruption. You have a fat sheriff in mirrorshades, and you have gals in short cut-offs. You have ample use of the word "boy" aimed at adults. And you have shitloads of fightin', shootin', drinkin', and drivin' -- sometimes all done at the same time. An untrained chimp could probably crap out a hicksploitation film that I would be happy with so long as it contained these key elements in some loosely assembled fashion.

Alas that Redneck Revenge was not made by a collective of untrained chimps. I'm generally very forgiving of the obvious short-comings in DIY shot-on-video films, as my reviews of both Twisted Issues and Goblin attest to. Because I've been there, and because I have the utmost respect for someone who loves film so much that will sink all their time into a hopelessly bad home movie that no one outside of a very small circle will ever see. These are people who make a movie simply because they want to, because they love it, and because they have no regard for the business, the industry, or any of the trappings that get in the way of raw passion for orchestrating some sort of cinematic madness. For a shot-on-video DIY film to draw my ire, it has to be bad. I mean really bad. In fact, it has to be way worse than bad: it has to be limp and boring. In short, it has to be Redneck Revenge.

There are a multitude of reasons I hate this movie, and believe me, we'll touch on every one of them in loving detail. First and foremost though is the fact that this movie, unlike a lot of other bad SOV films, does not seem like it's simply a really bad movie made by people who really love movies. It plays instead like a really bad local television commercial, which is ultimately all the movie turns out to be. I'm sure it was fun for the people involved to see themselves up on someone else's television screen, but this movie forgot to make it fun for the rest of us.

The action, if you want to amuse yourself by using that term, begins with a chubby mullet-sporting small-town sheriff on a drug bust. I could make fun of the sheriff, but truth be told, he's one of those Joe Don Baker model of guys who could no doubt kick my ass up one bank of the Mississippi and down the other. The sheriff's name is Rick Montana, which is a pretty good hicksploitation film name. Montana is a good first or last name for anyone in the South, much like Cody, Scout, or Skyler. Rick is hiding in the bushes while his undercover man makes a cocaine deal, rural Alabama being a hotbed of cocaine sales. Of course the bad guys, what with the fact that they are bad guys and all, kill the undercover guy rather than pay him. It's not that they wanted to kill a cop; they would have shot him even if he was a fellow criminal because the first rule of action films is that no transaction between criminals happens without one group double-crossing the other.

As the deal turns fatal, DEA agents and the state police swarm out of their hiding places. Actually, no, it's just Rick, who apparently thought he could bust up a huge drug smuggling ring with just him and his buddy. I guess his thinking was not entirely off base, as all evidence points to these drug dealers being pretty crummy at their job. Sure they have a briefcase full of cocaine, but man alive do they ever drive a piece of junk car. It's like buying coke from Roy Clark. Anyway, Rick comes lumbering down out of the hills with shotgun a-blazin', and despite the fact that he's shooting people at more or less point blank range, there is no blood. There is no force of impact. There is no shotgun wound, or any sort of wound at all.

Now believe me, I understand the hassle of pulling off gunshots in a low budget or no budget film. You have to get permits, you have to pay fees, and you have to get blanks, a special effects guy who can do squibs, et cetera et cetera. It can be a hassle, and rigging your own squibs is not as easy as one might think. You can't just tie a firecracker to a condom filled with fake blood and hope for the best. So what you do, if you have any respect at all for what you are attempting to make, is you work around it. You don't show the shotgun go off. You don't show the bullet wound until after the fact, when all you have to do is poke a hole in someone's shirt. It's not difficult at all to dance around the fact that you don't have blanks or explosive squibs. This movie decides instead to have a guy running out of the woods firing a shotgun with no kickback and no smoke that kills people without actually causing any physical damage to their bodies. I suppose it could be some new experimental weapon, or maybe Rick is supposed to be something of an idiot, and he really is just running out after people with an empty gun. After all, the people he "kills" can be seen clearly taking big, heaving breaths after their so-called deaths. It could be that they were just like, "Oh Jesus, this guy again? Okay, when he makes the gun noise, just pretend to die, and then he'll go away."

After killing the drug dealers, he kneels for the touching scene next to his fallen comrade, whom he then leaves lying out in the field along with the two dead drug dealers and several kilos of cocaine. I may not be a law enforcement specialist, but I watched a lot of episodes of TJ Hooker (well, one episode, which is probably more than most of you) when I was younger, and I'm pretty certain there are guidelines for drug busts and homicides, like you report the whole incident and don't leave all the bodies and drugs lying in a field where some young backwoods kid can take his friends on an adventure by uttering the line "You guys wanna see a dead body?" I'm pretty sure that even if you are a big Southern sheriff in a tank top who refuses to call the DEA or any back-up at all in on a coke bust, you still have to do stuff afterwards with all the corpses and evidence.

But Rick will have none of that. While his narration rambles on in a quality so fuzzy you can't make out anything but the shockingly original "Seems like everyone close to me ends up dead," Rick just leaves everything lying, hops in a nearby muscle car, and drives off into the sunset.

So we're not off to a smashing start, but at the same time, the movie hasn't done anything too terribly unforgivable. I mean, smokeless shotguns that leave no bullet wounds in the still-breathing dead are signs of sloppy film making, but there's a certain charm to them as well.

We then skip forward, and presumably to another town, where a big fat guy who looks like Wilford Brimley pulls up on a fancy-pants three-wheeled motorcycle. It looks like something a Shriner might drive around during a local homecoming parade. A local youth is mightily impressed with the trike, however, and as the fat guy, named Red, slides gracefully off his iron steed, the youth takes to polishing the same three or four parts over and over. They have some sort of conversation, but apparently the audio was looped in at a later date after being recorded on Fisher Price equipment inside a wind tunnel, or possibly beneath a highway overpass as a tornado blew through.

As Red saunters off, another fat guy pulls up in a car and immediately begins to admire the trike as well. Personally, I always thought "trike" was a word that referred to Big Wheel type toddler tricycles, but whatever. This second fat guy, different from the first in that he doesn't have a thick droopy mustache, is the local town boss. He sure does like that trike.

Now, okay, let's review. Lone lawman, check. Fat small town boss, check. Shotguns and muscle cars, check. So they had all the ingredients, they just didn't know what to do with them. The shotgun doesn't actually shoot, and the corrupt boss drives an Acura. What the hell kind of small Southern boss drives an Acura or Saturn or whatever the hell it was? I mean, Sheriff Rick may be sorta lame, but at least he drives a muscle car. Bosses are supposed to drive those stretch caddies with steer horns on the hood, even if they aren't in Texas. Or a cool truck. Or something, anything, other than an Acura. Remember Isaac Hayes in Escape From New York as the Duke? He drove around a big long Caddy with chandeliers for headlights. You knew he was the shit. Now, how much different would his first scene be if, instead of a long Caddy with chandelier headlights, he had stepped out of a Dodge Neon?

The boss says something, but since the audio has been recorded through a broken mic wrapped in a very thick, wet towel, I'll de damned if I could make out a word of it. I'm guessing he was telling the rag boy how much he liked the trike and how he would like to steal it or something. The boss then waddles over to Red's bar and tries to muscle the trike out of his possession. You may be thinking that a fruity looking custom trike may not be that cool an impetus for violence, and you'd be right. It's not like the boss is fighting to buy some land so he can tear down a youth center and build a casino. He wants a trike. If he's the boss of the town, why doesn't he just go down to the shop and order one? If he had watched this movie, he would have seen that the end credits display the shop's address for a good five minutes, so it's not like he couldn't find the place.

I guess even the boss felt like the whole trike thing was pretty lame, so he also throws in that he wants to muscle Red out of ownership of this shitty bar in the middle of nowhere that about four people go to. It's sort of like if two people went to war over the ownership of a Hardees franchise. When the boss's goons try to rough ol' Red up, it attracts the attention of Rick, who had been sitting down at the end of the bar looking sort of like a disturbing cross between Jerry Lawler, John Ritter, and that guy Al from Home Improvement. Rick doesn't take too kindly to these yokels hassling Red, so he decks them in the lamest barroom brawl you're likely to see. One of the guys has got to be lugging around over three hundred pounds, not an ounce of it muscle.

Red's assailants thus vanquished, Rick takes time out to please us all with an acoustic musical interlude -- he kicks ass AND plays acoustic guitar for the ladies afterwards! That's a modern sort of hero. While a couple of the local barmaids sit and half listen to his crooning, Rick goes through an entire full-length song. They go through the whole song! And it sounds like they recorded it on a Fischer Price tape deck. This sort of movie is made by calling on friends and local businessmen who want to get their wares put on screen for a few minutes in exchange for some goods or services. Apparently none of the people involved knew anyone from a local radio station, or even a high schooler who had mastered the art of operating a tape recorder.

While Rick woos the lasses with his velvet voice and guitar picking, the gang of fat guys convene to mumble about teaching everyone a lesson. I gotta tell you, even though one of them looks a lot like Big Van Vader, this is a pretty sad gang. What is this guy the boss of anyway? If his dream in life is to own a trike and a rat-infested shithole of a bar, he can't be a very powerful boss. This is like watching the VFW guys try to take over a town, except that those guys, even though they could all be in their eighties, could still kick a little ass better than this bunch of yahoos.

And then we're back to Rick, who is singing another song! Geez! Only a minute in between acoustic guitar interludes??? Isn't that against the law? What the hell did I rent here? Redneck Revenge or Joan Baez and Friends Honor John Denver? At least this number was interrupted by Freddie Prinze Sr., who comes to threaten Rick some more. Since Rick just kicked all their asses when they attacked him at once, kicking one guy's ass isn't that big a deal, though I wish I could say he issued an ass kicking. Instead, he just sort of grabs the guy and maybe pushes him around a little until the guy falls down and runs off. To be fair, it looks like most of the real-life fights I've ever seen.

The boss decides he can catch more flies with honey than he can with an out of shape Mexican and a fat guy. He catches up with Rick while the heroic one is hopping into his muscle car. Every time they show the muscle car, surf guitar music plays, which is a pretty cool feature of the car. The boss apologizes for the initial bad impression and invites Rick over to his vast estate for a party. Rick, not wanting to miss out on free booze and chicks, agrees.

He must have been mightily disappointed. Look, every evil guy has to have an estate and a pool with lots of random sexy women cavorting around it, preferably topless. How many movie bad guys have you seen in this set-up, usually as they sit in a lounge chair, wearing sunglasses and a terrycloth robe, talking on a cell phone? Every lame action movie has this scene in order to communicate the wealth, power, and decadence of the master criminal.

The big problem here is that this boss's decadent orgy looks like a Fourth of July pool party. He has a modest suburban home slightly less impressive than my parents' place (maybe my dad, then, could be a corrupt small town boss!) and a fresh stock of mildly attractive to Plain Jane gals populating his pool. None of them are topless. What the hell? How did this guy get a gang, even one as lame as what he has? I mean, Spankie from the Little Rascals was a more imposing and better connected gang leader than this loser. Come on, wood paneling may give your living room a cozy feel, but it's not the sort of interior decor a ruthless crime lord goes in for. This guy seems only slightly better off, if any at all, than everyone else in the movie. Who are these women in the pool lazily tossing a ball around? And why do they hang out at this fat old guy's pool party when it's obvious he wields no authority or power whatsoever and isn't even slightly rich? Why does he command a gang of goons and bikini clad lasses, even average looking ones he apparently picked up down at the local temp secretary office?

Okay, so this boss has Rick over for the pool party, and they hang out for a while, and then what does he do to seal his possession of Rick's soul? Offer him a room full of naked women who will attend to his every desire? Offer him wealth, power, political influence, or free rides on the trike? No, he invites Rick into the basement to watch crappy movies. This may be an okay thing for me to do on slow Saturday nights with a few friends, but I'm not trying to win over a righteous sheriff and get him to help me bump off some other old fat guy so I can have his bar and bike. And of all the movies they pick to watch, they watch one called Blood Bath, apparently about Tommy Smothers hunting a serial killer.

We then get to watch several minutes of this completely different movie also distributed by Something Weird. At first I thought someone had recorded over part of the movie with a bunch of advertisements. I mean, it goes on for several minutes, but then they cut back to the fat guy laughing. I guess this is part of the movie. Let's lay something on the line right now -- Redneck Revenge is barely an hour long. At least seven of those minutes go to Rick singing songs. A good few minutes more go to playing scenes from a completely different movie of similar American Wrestling Association quality production values. Later on, we'll have pointless minutes devoted to Rick farting around in an ultralight (one of those little flying lawn mower deals) and looking at an elephant. If your movie is only an hour long, then half the total running time should not be filler, especially filler from other movies full of filler. How the hell hard is it to just rip off Walking Tall? I mean, the movie's already been made. All you gotta do is cheapen it up a bit, get worse actors, and presto!

Anyway, after a few minutes of that, it's back to the pool party, where the women are still tossing around the beach ball and possibly popping Valium based on the level of excitement they communicate. And then it's back inside and suddenly we -- I mean they -- are watching Something Weird nudie loops. I'll tell you what -- if this is the only nudity in the whole movie, I'm gonna be mightily pissed.

After tempting Rick with this small collection of select titles from the Something Weird catalog, the fat boss figures he's got our man in the palm of his hand. He heads out to make a deal with the Red: bet the bike and the bar (I think) in the local tough man contest. If Red can't find a man who can win the tournament, he'll lose it all. If he wins, well then, he doesn't seem to get anything. Pretty damn stupid bet if you ask me, but then, I'm not a betting man. Needless to say, Rick steps up to the plate, even displaying his boxing prowess by breaking a pool cue against the table, which I'm sure Red really appreciated. He only has three customers, and now one of them is always smashing things.

The boss is understandably angry, having thought that sitting in the basement watching boring movies with fully clothed, average looking women who didn't put out had been more than enough to entice Rick to join the dark side. Rick then switches into an "Anabolic Activator" sweatshirt cut off 80s style to communicate his recent acquisition of the eye of the tiger. He goes around watching stock footage of local tough man competitions for more padding. Frequent cuts to reaction from the people in this movie help reassure us that this is all part of the plot and not just some cable access thing someone accidentally recorded over the movie.

This goes on for a while.

32 minutes in, and we finally get a rebel flag. How the hell can you make a movie called Redneck Revenge and let half a stinkin' hour pass without a single rebel flag? Sorry, the one in the opening credits is a cheap shot, and I don't count that.

Determined to make sure Rick doesn't make it to the fateful tough man competition, the fat gang (not to be confused with the elusive and mysterious Gang of Fatty) sets up a cunning trap. Rick walks into an ambush, or purposely drives there, and gets his ass kicked in a very boring fashion. Then they drag him around behind the truck, because you always have to drag someone behind a truck in these movies. Luckily, they put a thick jacket on him and only drive across grass at very slow speeds. Don't the dozens of cars passing nearby on the road notice this? And for that matter, hasn't anyone thought of, you know, calling the cops? It's obvious that this boss is not one of those bosses who has the mayor and the chief of police in his pocket. I mean, this guy can't even put the squeeze on some old fart named Red. If this guy is lucky, maybe he can bully around the local newsie, but even that will only last until the newsie goes to high school or starts drinking Met-Rx. This boss has no local power whatsoever, so why don't they just call the cops on him and his worthless bunch of goons?

Anyway, I guess that doesn't matter. The boss shows up and says he doesn't want Rick to not be able to enter the contest. Why not? The bet was that Red couldn't find a guy who could win, so if Rick can't compete, well then there you go. Whatever the case, they leave Rick lying in the field. In a better generic action film, this is the part where a Shaolin monk or crazy feral girl is supposed to discover the beaten hero and nurse him back to health, after which he can start training for revenge. Instead, it's fat Red on his chopper trike, and they head off to the bar to get cleaned up. Don't these guys have homes? And how the heck did Red know Rick was lying unconscious in a vacant lot? Oh yeah, probably because the whole thing took place a few feet from a major road.

Anyway, I don't know about you, but all the action up to this point has me drained! Why don't we take a break from the non-stop thrills of Rick sitting poolside and turn our attentions to the wacky zany county fair! The arrival of the fair is announced by stock circus music. You know, a wise man once said that "Circus music ain't nothing but music you play at a circus," and I'd be hard-pressed to argue with him. This is the lamest county fair ever. I've been to a lot of county fairs. I've bee to county fairs in Kentucky, Florida, North Carolina, and even stopped at random ones as I stumbled across them driving through Georgia and Tennessee. I know my Southern county fairs, and let me tell you this one will make you wish it was as good as those mini-fairs that set up for a few days in the K-Mart parking lot.

This is where the tough man competition is being held, and it looks worse than the worst backyard wrestling ever, even worse than a Buff Bagwell vs Lex Luger match. Scenes of tough man action are intercut with interesting shots establishing the festive atmosphere of the fair -- a haunting juxtaposition of the fun of a fair with the dire situation Rick is in. Okay, not really. Mostly it's scintillating action-packed shots of funnel cakes being made. Now I like a good funnel cake. I even like a bad one, but I don't necessarily want to rent a video of them being made.

Then it's back to the contest, where they do the thing where the big guy holds the little guy back by the forehead, and the little guy swings wildly, his every blow falling woefully short of its target. I know my uncle used to do this to me, but is it really a viable defensive move in a no holds barred, bare knuckle street fight? For that matter, the "Indian wrist burn" my uncle generally followed up with looks to be more powerful than any of the offense we see on display in this parade of small town machismo.

After a little of that, as if the film didn't already have enough filler, we get random shot of Rick petting an elephant. Oookay. We're in a whole weird area here. And then it's back to the fight. Aren't people supposed to wear athletic gear? I mean, even in a small town affair such as this, shouldn't the guys show up wearing something other than their work clothes? I don't know -- a pair of old gym shorts, some sweat pants, something like that? And now that I think about it, what happens if neither Rick nor one of the boss's goons wins the tournament? Surely in a small rural Alabama town, there must be at least one hell-raising young ass-kicker who can wipe the floor with everyone else and has a physique that is actually more impressive than Billy Crystal's.

The tough man competition here will make those tough man competitions on television seem like well-choreographed Jackie Chan fight scenes. Hell, the fight scenes in this stinker will make you long for the polish and precision of even the lamest backyard wrestling federation, even one populated entirely by those thousand pound people who can't get out of bed. They showcase more athletic prowess on a daily basis than most of the contestants in this fantastic flurry of fisticuffs. How hard can it be to find a bunch of drunk hicks who can fight? And why is this whole sequence set to 1980s generic breakdance music? What the hell is Southern or rednecky about that? Were they too damn cheap to spring for some stock banjo music or some Skynard?

More elephant footage then, set to drunken kooky music. Isn't this Rick guy supposed to be fighting or something? For a bare-knuckles, no holds barred competition populated by the local fat boss' thugs, he's yet to get so much as a scratch or bruise, and he apparently has plenty of time and energy for traipsing about the midway in between matches, spending his time stroking elephants and watching a family of acrobats easily on the skill level of your more mediocre 4th grade gymnast girls.

With the first day of vicious fighting over, the thugs proclaim that it is time to take the kid gloves off. Shouldn't they have done that to begin with? What was the benefit of having the kid gloves on in the first place? And once again, isn't this a lot of trouble to go through for a trike?

To prove they mean business, the fat boss's thugs show up and hang Rick's little brother, or buddy, who possesses an unsettling resemblance to Roger Clinton. Okay, now I have to ask one more time -- aren't there any cops in this town? This fat guy isn't so rich that he could have bribed the whole place, or even one person. Hell, his television was a 15-inch Magnavox. Isn't Rick a cop? Or at least an ex cop? Wouldn't it occur to him that maybe he could seek assistance from the local constabulary?

To cement their evilness, the thugs kidnap the girl Rick had been scamming on with the acoustic guitar approach. You know, just in case killing his little brother wasn't enough. Why would they kill him and only kidnap her? Naturally, they say if he ever wants to see her alive again, he'll lose the fight. But wait -- then why did the boss want to make sure Rick could compete, if he's just going to threaten him into losing? Man, this movie is complex! So okay, we have extortion, assault and battery, murder, and now kidnapping. I'm still thinking a call to the cops might be in order, but then, I'm no Rick Montana. Angry at hearing this threat, Rick disregards that whole thing about not killing messengers and snaps the neck of the guy who delivered the threat. Isn't that, you know, illegal? I mean, the guy wasn't even armed. He didn't even take a swing at Rick. I know Rick's pissed about his brother, but breaking someone's neck when you don't even know if they were involved in the murder isn't the most heroic thing in the world, even if the guy looks sort of like a woodchuck.

Rick determines that the best course of action is to fly around in an ultralight for a spell. An ultralight is a very small aircraft, generally single person, that looks like a flying go-cart. You don't need a pilot's license, and they are fairly cool, I will admit. But what the hell? It's not like you can sneak up on someone in one of those things, especially if it has a giant neon green sail. They aren't very fast, but they are very loud. What the heck is this supposed to accomplish other than to show off the fact that one of Rick Montana's friend's owns an ultralight? Well, I guess he does land it about fifteen feet away from where he took off, so maybe he was just blowing off some steam. He might have given one of those, "You know, when I'm up here, all the problems of the world seem a million miles away" emo speeches, but since the audio throughout the whole movie was recorded via an intricate network of cardboard paper towel tubes, I can't be sure if anything was said at all.

Right about now, this is all making me long for the blistering pace and intelligence of Mitchell. You never realize how good a Joe Don Baker film is until you sit down and try to watch something like Redneck Revenge.

So Rick sits and waits for the bad guys to stop by with the girl, and then he kicks some ass and rescues her. Does he use a gun on these possibly armed assailants who have already murdered his little brother (or possibly just his little buddy)? Hell no, that ain't the Southern way. Oh wait, yes it is. Anyway, Rick opts to open a can of whoop-ass pro wrestling style, and takes on the thugs with a folding metal chair. Pretty exciting. La Parka this guy ain't. This scene, incidentally, like just about every other scene in the movie, takes place either in a construction site or a car port. It's difficult to tell which, but apparently this entire town is made of car ports and construction sites.

Meanwhile, the fat boss is back hassling Red again. Why do they keep letting him into the bar? Rick shows up to clean a little house, this time sporting a wrestling belt. Oh wait, it's from the tough man competition. I guess he won. Finally, some cops show up with Rick and arrest the boss. Shouldn't they be upset about the dude with the broken neck? And shouldn't they mention that maybe Rick should have called them before the kidnapping and murder? Speaking of which, for a guy whose little brother was murdered the day before, Rick is in a pretty jovial mood. He even feels like singing! Oh no, wait, instead he just drinks. Oh no, he is singing after all. Hey buddy, they murdered your brother! Shouldn't you pry your fat ass up off your bar stool and quit singing honky tonk love songs to the barmaid?

Well, he does pry his ass up off the bar stool, but only to go up on stage and celebrate his victory by performing rousing country western numbers with a band called The Tres Hombres,which features four members. I guess one guy isn't an hombre. So in exchange for the life of his little brother, Rick helped a complete stranger maintain possession of a goofy looking custom trike. The movie closes with some wussie break dancing music. Where the hell did that come from, besides out of a pre-programmed Casio keyboard?

Since I always like to accentuate the positive of even a very bad movie, allow me to state the two positive aspects of Redneck Revenge. First, Lori Gretchen, who appears for a few seconds as a random girl in the pool party scene, is cute. Second, the movie is only an hour long. Somehow, these are hardly worth the investment of time, but at least I didn't trade the life of a loved one.

This movie sucks. It doesn't suck because it's bad. It sucks because it's boring. Because it never goes anywhere. Because it's lazy. The people behind this movie should be ashamed of themselves. Even high schoolers can make more impressive videos. To top things off, Big Ray's Custom Trike gets a credit, complete with address and multiple angles of the famous trike as featured in the smash hit Redneck Revenge. It goes on for a spell. So what you have here is not a movie at all. It's a very long commercial for Big Ray's and to a lesser extent, Something Weird Video. Normally, I'm a huge fan of Something Weird, but I'll never forgive them for this.

As far as locally produced commercials go, this was pretty good. It was even better than the old Gainesville Steven A. Bagan, attorney at law commercials where the little slobbering kid waggles his finger at the camera and drools out the line, "Remember! Safety First!" It was not, however, better than the collective commercial works of Louisville's "Smilin' Irishman" used car lot commercials.

As far as movies go, even hour-long shot-on-video movies made for less than the price of a meal at Denny's, this thing just plain stinks. Almost all of it is filler. You can't hear a single word that's being said. The action is non-existent. There's violence but not interesting violence, no nudity except in those strip loops they watch, and every character is goofy beyond belief. The script couldn't have been worse if it had been written by very small mollusks. All this over a trike? A local boss criminal who actually has no power, yet can still go around killing Roger Clinton without anyone getting upset? Okay, maybe that's believable, but what about everything else?

Everything about this film reeks of utter and complete buffoonery. I don't even know why they bothered, but then, I don't really know why I bothered to watch the whole thing. I could have been doing something more enjoyable, like dragging myself up and down the street using just my lips. And you know what -- that would have been faster paced and more action packed than Redneck Revenge. There is nothing at all of merit in this film unless you are really into trikes, and even then it's probably still not worth it.

I can't really judge the acting since I couldn't hear a damn word over the din of background noise that was amplified to near Motorhead-like decibels. What I could make out was pretty abysmal. And what's with all the goddamned circus footage? If you're going to put a family of acrobats in your movie, at least get ones that have mastered something ore than the dramatic front tumble or swinging back and forth on the trapeze. I understand the people who made this probably wanted to cram everything from their local community into the movie, but you know what? They're community was really amazingly boring. Think about how much fun you would have watching home videos of complete strangers talking about middle school football, and you have in your mind a video that will prove at least twice as interesting as this.

I want to say good things about this movie. Believe me, I do. Rick Montana is a big guy, and I don't want to piss him off by insulting a movie that, despite what appears on the screen, was probably a lot of work. You'll notice that, unlike other movie review websites, I rarely post negative reviews, and even my negative reviews strive to highlight the positive parts. I mean, I'm the guy that was kind to both Billy Jack and Gymkata for cryin' out loud -- I'm a very forgiving man. I'm especially forgiving when it comes to do-it-yourself projects. I generally feel that they deserve the support of the fringe film community because they are labors of love from people working 100% outside the mainstream, doing it for fun instead of profit. Even when the movie stinks, and they often do, I still admire it and ultimately enjoy the hell out of it. I want to like those films, because I don't enjoy writing negative reviews. I don't enjoy criticizing someone's hard work, or even their half-assed work. I don't enjoy writing about movies I don't enjoy.

I didn't enjoy Redneck Revenge. In fact, it makes me angry. How dare they seize such a worthwhile title and apply it to such an appallingly awful piece of garbage. I hope Big Ray got a little extra business out of this, or Rick Montana got a recording deal or something, because then at least this film would have served some purpose other than being a colossal waste of time that will make you pine for the cleverness of The Dukes of Hazzard. At least Boss Hogg controlled the local political and law enforcement scene. The boss here doesn't control jack shit.

And jack shit is exactly what this sorry-ass excuse for a film is worth.

Labels: Rednecks, Year: 1996