Month: April 2020

The Bellmen (2020)

The indie comedy The Bellmen stands in the tradition of ensemble comedies like Super Troopers and Waiting, chronicling the odd lives and codes of honor of working class workers. Set in an Arizona resort hotel near Tucson, the film opens with the initiation of Josh (Josh Zuckerman) as a bellman by the seasoned bell captain Steve (Adam Ray) and his team of bellmen. As a BIT (Bellman in Training), Josh has to cover a lot of ground, bearing up under hazing by his fellow workers and learning the complex code of the bellmen. Meanwhile, Steve tries to win the heart of Kelly (Kelen Coleman), a manager at the hotel, despite having been stuck as a bellman for the past twenty-seven years. Into this comes Gunther (Thomas Lennon), a New Age guru obsessed with hand hygiene, who soon bewitches workers and hotel guests alike.

The Bellmen is a bro-comedy that proves to be gentler than it initially appears. While there’s the usual ribbing of the new guy and one or two silly sex jokes, it never gets mean-spirited, nor does it rely on the sexism, gross-out humor, and bro-code that many comedies of its type use as substitutes for actual laughs. The jokes don’t exactly fly fast and furious – the comedy is mostly situational and rarely laugh out loud, yet there’s something kindly charming about the whole enterprise, evading easy laughs in favor of absurd situations, vignettes, and non-sequiturs.

While this is still a bro-comedy, the women do get a few chances to be funny, especially Susan (Anjali Bhimani), who walks into a management meeting already two steps ahead of everyone and ends it by flinging papers in the air and running out. But the women are mostly there for support and sexiness, with Gunther’s female companions used as props rather than fully fledged characters. This isn’t surprising, but one wishes that they’d been given a bit more to do.

While the majority of the cast are still more or less in their career infancy, three recognizable (and welcome) faces are Thomas Lennon, as the confusingly accented guru Gunther, Richard Kind as the hotel’s owner, and Willie Garson as Alan, the increasingly put-upon manager who keeps giving recalcitrant workers demerits in a system he’s made up. Lennon in particular helps to guide the plot and provides some of the film’s most entertaining set pieces as he spouts New Age platitudes and confusing metaphors that wander off into infinity. Lennon’s presence is referential here – after all, he made his name in this kind of comedy with Reno 911! – but he luckily doesn’t dominate the proceedings.

But the main cast, beyond the recognizable faces, do most of the heavy lifting, and a lot of the film’s charm is down to Adam Ray, who could have played Steve as an overconfident idiot. Instead, Steve constantly tries to hide his sense of inadequacy, his genuine romanticism, and his love of his job. Steve aspires to a management position not because he really wants one but because he think it will make him more attractive to Kelly. But his true love is being a bellman, and there’s a sweet silliness to the seriousness with which all the characters take their jobs that elevates the film even more.

The Bellmen aspires to cult heights in the same vein as Super Troopers, but it may not go down as a cult film simply because it’s far too nice. And that, to be honest, is what’s most enjoyable about it. Rather than relying on the jokes that have dated more than a few films like it, The Bellmen gives more space to absurdist humor (including a mysterious cactus) and even character development. Is it silly? Oh, very. But silliness is underrated, and The Bellmen proves that you can construct a film like this without relying on offensive comedy.

The Bellmen comes to iTunes, Amazon, Google, and Vudu in May.

Silent Panic (2019)

Silent Panic takes a standard thriller narrative and uses it to launch a character study of three friends’ very different reactions to the same event. The film opens with the abandonment of a woman’s body in the trunk of a car. The car belongs to Eagle (Sean Nateghi), an ex-con camping with his friends Dom (Jay Habre) and Bobby (Joseph Martinez) in Angeles National Forest. The three are having a perfectly pleasant time until they discover the body and wind up disagreeing on how to handle it. Dom and Bobby are all for going to the police, but Eagle doesn’t think that the cops will believe them that the body just showed up in their trunk. As their decisions compound the problem, the film becomes something of a case study in how the men react to the circumstances, and how their choices complicate things further.

The basic setup of Silent Panic is the sort of thing we’d expect from an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the initial events play out much as an episode would. The responses of the three men are natural – Eagle doesn’t want to be sent back to prison, the other two are disturbed by his recalcitrance and increasingly guilt-ridden themselves, especially Bobby, who struggles with a drug problem. And the film makes much of this conflict, as the three move farther from being able to reveal the presence of the body without implicating themselves. Nor can they agree on what to actually do with the body—it remains in the trunk of Eagle’s car, and is the source of the film’s best tension, as he attempts to conceal its presence from his girlfriend, Robin (Constance Brenneman).

The strength of the film lies in its ability to establish and maintain tension, something which it succeeds at much of its runtime. The choice not to go to the cops is primarily Eagle’s, and he’s at once the most interesting and least sympathetic of the three protagonists, essentially telling his friends what to do in an effort to protect himself. There’s betrayal and complication, anger and misdirected energy, and the question of how the body even got there, who it is, and why it’s in their trunk. For the most part, Silent Panic manages to maintain its tension without going overboard.

The film’s weakness, though, lies in the increasingly unbelievable choices made by its protagonists, a few plot holes that are difficult to ignore, and the occasional divergence into near-comedy that seems, in places at least, unintentional. Bobby heads off to his drug dealer when he can no longer stand the tension, resulting in an extended scene in which Jeff Dowd (touted as the real-life inspiration for the Dude in The Big Lebowski) tries to convince Bobby to go to rehab, all while puffing on a vape pen. Entertaining? Yes. But not particularly applicable to the plot at large.

More problematic are some of the characters’ reactions to the presence of the body, as when Eagle decides to go off gambling and deny the body’s existence at all. Most thrillers have some kind of plot hole, but there are a number of open questions: if the woman disappeared, do the police know? Why aren’t they mentioning her disappearance? Isn’t that body beginning to smell? And so forth. While we can get past some of the problems, others become more prevalent the more you think about them.

Silent Panic is a middling thriller, with a solid concept and mostly solid performances. Director Kyle Schadt finds some excellent points of tension to keep the viewer engaged, but the film becomes less believable as it goes on. Still, it’s a good piece of entertainment and a character-driven approach to the thriller that should be lauded for the attempt.

Silent Panic is available to stream on Tubi, Amazon, YouTube, and Google Play.