BEFORE: Some days I'm really pressed for what to say about a film - tonight's just the opposite, I've probably got too much to say, which comes from having too much information about it. I was involved in the production of this film at nearly every stage, because I'm the office manager for the studio that made it, so I did many tasks on this film, from typing up the script (which was the last step in the process, oddly, but I'll explain this later) to dealing with film festivals, doing publicity and social media for the film, and working on the Kickstarter campaign that partially financed it, both at the pledging and the reward fulfillment stages (we finished earlier this year, only a year or so later than planned - more on that to follow, too). See what I mean? I could probably write a whole book about the three-year production of this film, and who knows, maybe someday I will. But for tonight I'll try to keep it short.
I also voiced one of the characters, but I wouldn't be so bold as to use myself as a link (I also don't have enough material for that.). Matthew Modine carries over from "Sicario: The Day of the Soldado" to voice a biker named Sid. Since this was an independent film made with a low production budget, there are only a couple well-known actors involved, so that made it tough to link to, I had to wait for two Modine films and sandwich it in between them.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Cheatin'" (Movie #1,650)
THE PLOT: A low-rent bounty hunter named Rod Rosse, the One-Man posse, gets entangled in a web of danger when he takes on a job from an ex-biker/ex-wrestler turned U.S. Senator named "Deathface".
AFTER: OK, so first off, this film had its origins at the San Diego Comic-Con, where I worked a booth for Bill Plympton for about 15 years, and one thing that happens at Comic-Con is you meet a lot of people, that's what the event is for - or, perhaps more to the point, it's where fans often get to meet the people they admire. I built up quite an impressive collection of autographs from "Star Wars" actors in my travels there, because that's who I admire, and I saw the opportunity to turn all those random encounters into something. But one year (I don't remember exactly which one), Bill met this animator named Jim Lujan, who was making his own independent animated shorts, just like Bill's been doing forever. Jim gave Bill some DVDs of his shorts, they struck up a friendship, and eventually that led to making this movie together as co-directors. It's a bit unusual because most films only have one director, and Bill never shared director credit with anyone before, plus Jim wrote the script and designed the characters, with Bill then animating another person's characters in something like his style. Only from an artistic standpoint, it's a bit rougher and cruder than Bill's usual work, but at the end of the day, it's a melding of their art styles.
But the resulting art style works for the story, which is set in the sleazy underworld of the L.A. area, which is filled with convenience stores and tattoo parlors, nightclubs where anything goes, and sleazy hotels where people are hiding out. Other films that have explored this same territory include "Pulp Fiction" and "The Big Lebowski", which have almost as many crazy characters. Throw in a little bit of "Sons of Anarchy", too, because out in the desert (in a region called the Inland Empire, which is a real thing) there are biker clubs and rock festivals and maybe even a cultist compound, who the hell knows what's going on there, am I right? But let's focus on the biker club, called the Inland Emperors.
Lana, the daughter of the club's founders has taken something valuable from the bikers (aha, another heist film!) and Senator Deathface (an ex-member of the club) wants to get it back, whatever it is. (Unlike "Pulp Fiction", though, we do eventually get to find out exactly what's in the briefcase, so to speak.) So he hires four bounty hunters to track her down and get the item back - it's a bit like when Darth Vader hired Boba Fett and five others to track down the Millennium Falcon, only there are no droids or Mandalorians in this bunch. The unassuming, accountant-like Rod Rosse is the important one here, assuming he can get his mother to stop talking to her cats and fiddling with her wrist-tasers long enough to give him a lead. The others are the Foxy-Brown-like Odell Braxton, a large Japanese man named Jose Tanaka, and the shabby but sneaky Ace of Spades.
The bikers of the Inland Emperors Club are also looking for Lana, because she stole the item from their club, and they were holding it for the Senator, who frequently used the bikers as security guards. The clock is ticking, because Deathface has a big charity rock concert planned, and whatever the item is, he needs it back before then. The bounty hunters and the bikers try track her down through her weed dealer, her stepbrother (who DJ's at a transvestite or transgender nightclub) and her attempt to connect with Big Poppa Booyah, another ex-wrestler who was wronged by Deathface, and might want a little revengeance of his own. One bounty hunter accidentally finds himself in Mexico, and Rod Rosse gets lost in the desert (another accidental connection to yesterday's "Sicario" sequel!) but he's rescued by some of those crazy cult members, who want to sacrifice him to the great god Zorna.
A couple of last-minute rescues later, and all the players find themselves at the big charity rock concert featuring fictional bands like Night Rattler and Snatch-Dragon (where several prominent Kickstarter backers can be spotted, drawn into the crowd scenes) and finally the big reveal of what got stolen from the biker's club in the first place. I must admit that even though I typed up the script, I was quite suprised by the reveal and how funny it turned out to be. But as I mentioned before, sometimes Bill Plympton doesn't stick to the script, he prefers to jump from storyboards to animation, and scenes from his films develop sort of organically over time. This effect was heightened when making "Revengeance", because Jim Lujan voiced about half of the characters, and I think he did a fair amount of improv along the way. So, typing the final script was the LAST step in production for us (for most studios, it would be the first step, or close to it) and we only did that because the film got released in France first, and our distributor there needed the final script in order to translate it into French subtitles.
Once this film was completed, we sort of encountered the same problem we've had for years, in that there's not much of a market in the U.S. for animated features aimed at adults. "Sausage Party" really broke through in 2016, but it turned out to be more of an exception than any kind of new rule - in the U.S., most animated films are made for and marketed toward children only, which is a shame, even though that's proven to be quite successful over time. (Sure, it works, but why not make films for 100% of people, instead of just young ones?). I pity all the parents who have to suffer through terrible kids movies like "Trolls" and "Angry Birds" just because their kids want to see them. Plympton's films have always been aimed at the college and adult markets, which has been limiting, to say the least - in other countries, especially France, and his films are more widely seen, because it's not so unusual there for adults to go see an animated film that has more adult humor.
Side note - when the film opened in France, in late 2016, a couple of newspapers there hailed the "Senator Deathface" character as a Trump-like character, because Trump had some loose connection with the WWE, and people were still trying to make sense of the recent election. It's not possible, of course, because an animated feature takes at least three years to make (even when you work quickly, like we do) and nobody saw Trump coming in 2013 or 2014. If anything, Deathface bears more of a resemblance to Jesse Ventura, because Trump never wore a wrestling costume or had long hair or was an ex-biker, plus he was never a Senator before getting elected President. So there are too many differences for him to be any kind of Trump analogy, but that didn't stop the French press from making the connection, and then at that point you just sort of enjoy whatever publicity might put more eyeballs on the film.
But the distribution of this film has been slow - after playing in international festivals and getting a French theatrical release in 2016, we started entering it in U.S. festivals (where Bill's films tend to do well) and it won a couple of awards, like Best Animated Feature in the Portland International Film Festival and also the Nashville Film Festival. Before playing it in a few theaters, we took it to San Diego Comic-Con in 2017, and that was a bit of a disaster. We were thrilled at first to screen the film there (Bill had done panels and screened short films, but had never had an official screening of an animated feature film there) but they gave this film a terrible time-slot - Friday night, when most everyone wants to go out and party in the Gaslamp District. Then, to make matters worse, they printed the wrong DAY in the official program, so some fans might have showed up on Saturday, only to find that they missed the Friday night screening. (I had them print a correction as soon as I spotted the error, but I feared that the damage was already done, because who the hell reads the daily corrections to the schedule?).
We had a good crowd show up on that Friday night, but the room wasn't exactly packed. This was one reason (there were several others) that my Comic-Con spirit sort of broke in 2017, and I haven't been back there since. The rising costs of maintaining a booth there, shipping merchandise back and forth and travel costs for personnel was another reason to get off the crazy carousel that is SDCC. But finally in 2018 we were able to get the film self-released on DVD and BluRay, mainly because we'd promised physical autographed copies to many of the film's Kickstarter backers, but after those were shipped out, we've been selling the extra copies on Bill's Plymptoons web-site, and at the moment, this is the only way to view the film.
Times have changed, we realize that, and fewer people want to buy DVDs these days, and people would rather stream movies right to their TVs and computers without waiting for a disc to arrive by mail. We did have Bill's previous feature "Cheatin'" on Netflix for a while, but it was only a 2-year deal, and the rights eventually did come back to him (once he got them back from the aggregator). Other than a few shorts on iTunes, we haven't been able to break into the streaming market - but that might be about to change. A distributor called Shout! Factory recently made a deal to acquire the streaming rights for his whole library, so there's a chance that all of his features and shorts, including "Revengeance", could be available soon on one of the existing streaming services, or maybe a new one that hasn't launched yet. Here's hoping, because I'd love for his films to finally get the same sort of attention in the U.S. that they enjoy in other countries.
It's tough for me to rate this film, because I'm too close to it to have an unbiased opinion - it's the same dilemma I had with "Cheatin'" several years ago, in that it's a little weird for me to review and rate this, but it's also kind of weird if I avoid doing that. Tonight I tried to watch it with fresh eyes, and I don't think I've watched it all the way through before, without stopping because I was typing up the dialogue or something. There's maybe a bit of an odd narrative shift because the movie starts out with Rod as the central character (more or less) but by the end of the film, it feels more like Lana is the center of the story. But I feel there are so many other crazy characters that this point doesn't matter all that much.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that Bill tends to rely on car chase scenes in his features, most notably the 1997 film "I Married a Strange Person", where the gag-filled car chase scene takes up about the last 20 minutes of a 75-minute film. Subsequent features like "Mutant Aliens" and "Hair High" also had car chases at the end, but the trend was for them to get shorter and shorter, and by the time he directed "Cheatin'", released in 2013, the only car chase near the end took place on bumper cars at a carnival. My personal opinion is that the narratives in his films have gotten better as the car chases have gotten smaller, but this is just a working theory. There are some chase scenes in "Revengeance" (what would a film set in L.A. be without a couple car scenes on highways?) but they've been drastically reduced in size from the early days, so I don't think it really represents any back-sliding. Anyway, it's a little odd that in an animated film nearly anything can be depicted (as long as someone can draw it), but yet drawing an animated car doing an impossible stunt seems somehow less impressive than the practical live-action stunts in "Baby Driver". Does that make sense?
Still, in many ways making any film, especially an independent one, is like fighting a war on many fronts. So it doesn't matter if I'm thrilled with the end result, or overly critical of it - either way, the team that made this are the people that I fought beside for three or four years, and it's inevitable that you form friendships in the trenches, that's how you survive, when people know that you've got their backs and they've got yours.
Also starring the voices of Jim Lujan, Sara Ulloa, Kaya Rogue, Dave Foley (last heard in "Monsters University"), Lalo Alcaraz, Ruby Modine, Keith Knight, Ken Mora, Jose Tanaka, Geo Brawn, Deacon Burns, Charley Rossman, Robert Lujan, Mike Perez, Jose Cabrera and me (last seen in "The People vs. George Lucas")
RATING: 6 out of 10 cartons of Black Lung cigarettes.
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