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Director: Gary Kennamer
Screenplay: Gary Kennamer
Synopsis: Two airheaded males,
university students, break down in the middle of the rural American South,
finding themselves caught between drug dealers, a cop and a crazed cannibal in
the woods.
[Spoilers Throughout]
Welcome to
no-budget filmmaking at its most obscure. Shot of video, abruptly starting with
no opening credits, looking like a home movie. Two men, one African American
carrying a baseball and the other Caucasian, are in a car. Their accents are notable,
because after the success of Bill and
Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), these two figures' accents are clearly
the same surfer/stoner ones that Keanu
Reeves and Alex Winter had.
Fuzzier than an unshaved bear, the film for a while had no IMDB page, not even guessed date of release, although its clear
from the fashions including awful zebra print sweat trousers matched to a mauve
top that this was made in the early nineties. These two guy's car breaks down, leaving
them stuck in "redneck" country to their horror unable to pay for the
repairs. What is supposed to happen over the hour length of the film is a
comedy, leading them to be more open minded about the region when they finally
are able to leave, but it's a comedy as vague then you could imagine. |
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Most of the film consists of our two leads - one of them the most extreme in ending his dialogue with "Dude!" and "Hey!!" all the time - dicking about in the local Texas woodlands. It's very difficult to try to review Redneck County Fever when, even though events do happen, there's no momentum. Avant-garde films about characters just walking in the woods, like this, have more momentum and extravagance to them in comparison. Arguably, weren't it for my masochistic tastes, this would be one of the worst things I've covered in terms of completely lacking energy to it, and yet for the lunatics who find material like this like myself, that's as much part of the incentive to watch Redneck County Fever in the first place. In-between having to find the money to leave, inexplicably getting involved with transporting cocaine in a possibly stolen vehicle, and singing Band on the Run aimlessly, enough for it to not be libel, you'd think there'd be excitement but it's an amazing anti-excitement I had to admire for being so unintentional.
Set in the
South, banjo twang in the soundtrack, it's meant to be a comedy contrasting the
city slickers mocking the Southerners, barely registering baring the accents however
in terms of this culture clash. It doesn't help on such a low budget that most
of the film is shot in generic woodland, on roads or by nondescript buildings. Static
scenes of people talking is entirely the film's structure - if they weren't
there Redneck County Fever would
fall to pieces or be entirely about walking - and the notion of this being a
comedy is nonexistent unless this was a unique take on non-humour. Even
anti-humour have gags compared to this in the end, whilst this languishes in
their lack of. In what transpires, they meet a hitchhiker who turns out to be a
policeman. A preacher whose gift to bless cars so they start working again is
actually a con only really stupid people would fall for. And, belying more of a
traditional no-budget genre film, the pair also encounter a mad hunter in the
woodlands who uses traps, a cannibal who remarks on the virtues of human bacon
among other food stuffs whilst he has them tied up. He does bring something
vaguely more interesting happening as he remarks on the various ways to prepare
human meat and when the surfer dudes manage to convince him, through an
explicit reference to The Most Dangerous
Game, to let them go like an idiot to hunt them down again.
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You are stuck with a film that felt heavily improvised the most minimalist of filmmaking. You can even hear the director at one point, off-camera, giving directions when the actors get into a car. You expect, later on, the characters to relate the entire plot to the film's equivalent of a Southern Belle, as she artificially guffaws over each part, only for the film to thankfully cut to a caption suggesting time passed. An attempt at a shoot out at the end is played with a couple of actors, waving fake guns and hiding behind trees, Chekov's baseball being used for a second time in the film as an effective projectile weapon.
Altogether...this
is absolutely un-recommendable barring those who willingly trawl through the
outer regions of cinema. It doesn't even in sixty minutes sustain itself. If it
deserves to be preserved, to be watched a thousand years from now in the
fuzziness of its VHS version, it's because of what an oddity it is even in
no-budget cinema, usually not
"comedy" like this when horror is usually common in that field.
At one point, the film had no credits at all, making it a phantom. If the Letterboxd credits, the end credits on
the end of the version I saw the same, are accurate this was the only film
director Gary Kennamer ever made. Its
producer, David DeCoteau however is a
name you might recognise. Someone who openly admits he churns out films, he has
fans and enough different periods in his career to map a time line of. In the
eighties, his most popular era, he directed cult films like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama
(1988). By the 2000s into the 2010s, as an openly gay man, he made many
films (many likely shot at his own home) where the main attraction was nubile
young men with their shirts off. Than he's made a reputation, with films definitely
shot at his own home, with the likes of A
Talking Cat!?! (2013), in which Eric
Roberts recorded his lines over the phone. He did produce no-budget films
like Todd Sheet's Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death
(1991) in the early nineties, so he may have likely produced Redneck County Fever, adding to his
curious career as a director and producer. That background, and the film's
weird anti-charisma, is as much how the film's going to get any entertainment
value along its strange quirks. Just be aware for many it'll be death to sit
through for most sane film viewers.
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