Ya know, far be it for me, or any of us suckers lucky enough to get movies in the mail to review, to ever say that reviewing movies is a chore but, darn, sometimes it really is. Most of the time even the bad movies are watchably bad, and are at least amusing but once in a great while you get a movie like American Fetish, which is so unrepentantly mediocre that it takes everything in you to finish watching it. Sure, there are worse films than these, for sure, but there are scarcely films more boring, that is for sure.
American Fetish is the story of a man looking to solve the riddle of his deceased father. It seems his father had been an underground fetish filmmaker years earlier, many with the man’s mother in them, and had reached a level of infamy and legend until his death. His father also had been convicted of murders the son never believed he committed and he has now become obsessed with proving his father’s innocence. What the son finds though is that the deeper he digs into his father’s past the deeper he falls into the fetish world of his father. His only hope is that with the help of someone he can get to the bottom of the mystery of his father’s life before that life consumes him and changes him forever.
The first and most important thing you should know is that I had to look up what this movie was about because I had already forgotten. What this felt like was someone who knows a lot people in the fetish world and wanted to make a movie so they leaned on these friendships thinking they would make something shocking and gripping. Let me assure you – they didn’t. This is a clumsily made film with little plot, no logic, terrible acting, and no heart. It was all about the ideas and none of them connected with me. The film is far too interested in the fetish angle and not the mystery and they lose the story this way. Now, if you are into the fetish scene than there may be some interesting stuff for you though, honestly, none of if felt sexy, and none of it felt compelling. So instead of an interesting, edgy mystery film set in the fetish lifestyle you get a very boring movie that is obsessed with fetish but never makes it sexy. Not a good sign.
This movie doesn’t work, and the sad heck of it is that the review copy I got was shrunk to fit the cent of my HD set and had the ‘this is property of…’ info in the MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN. Distracting to say the least. The production values are low and it reflects on the quality of the film. I hate being so negative about a movie but it’s my hope that this film gets the door open for the filmmakers and actors and that they can use this as a way to get further in their careers. I just found nothing of interest here. It was boring, poorly shot, and utterly lost me as far as the story goes.
4 out of 10
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 