José Bénazéraf's L'enfer sur la plage (1965)

"L'enfer sur la plage se situe dans un cadre de roman d'aventures, trafic d'armes et services secrets. Une jeune nymphomane en bikini blanc sera le catalyseur inconscient des evenements sanglants a prevoir." (from Anthologie Permanente de l'Erotisme au Cinema José Bénazéraf by Paul Herve Mathis and Anna Angel, ed. Eric Losfeld, Le Terrain Vague, Paris, France, 1973)

"For...L'enfer sur la plage (Hell on the Beach; 1965), Benazeraf returned to the B-thriller style of L'eternite...Both films were successful, and both featured the expected Benazeraf mix of action, pretty girls and bare flesh that had already become his trade mark. But another, slightly more worrying, trait was also in evidence. As Cahiers du cinema noted, it was impossible to make any sense of the stories. Daylight shots appeared in the middle of sequences filmed at night; the dialogue often seemed unrelated to the action; establishing shots were done away with; long scenes filmed in single take replaced any conventional montage. The wilfulness that had always been present now took centre stage. But still there was a power and presence there and a determination to film, come what may. Even without a story, without dialogue and with no idea of where he was going Benazeraf loaded his camera and began to shoot. 'With all the stubborness and dignity of an angler in the middle of the desert.'

At the end of L'enfer sur la plage, Benazeraf gives his own view: 'Don't be deceived by appearances. Nothing happened by accident. Everything has been worked out, planned, premeditated...,' he says, as the camera moves through a darkened apartment." (from Immoral Tales: European Sex and Horror Movies 1956-1984 by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs, St. Martin's Griffin Press, New York, 1995)

Bazookas. Bikinis. The beach. Beautiful women. A score by Louiguy and legendary Chet Baker. Not only is a coherent narrative not necessary, any structure interferes with the laissez-faire, "come what may" attitude that José Bénazéraf's L'enfer sur la plage (1965) exudes. In her convertible, eating a flavored iced treat, "une jeune nymphomane en bikini blanc," driving along the seaside to the beach, comes to a quiet spot where three men are armed with bazookas. Their target is a small boat in the middle of a lagoon upon which lays a man and a woman napping and sunbathing. The cumbersome weapons are a lot more fun to play with than to manage; and the trio of men misses their target. Another group intercepts the trio and kills them, and the young blonde, having finished her iced treat and seen all the action, steals the binoculars out of one of the dead men's hands.
The MI5 makes an appearance, yet amongst all their intelligence-gathering computer technology, making typing noise and buzzing and whirring, Bénazéraf prefers the slow quiet shot of a female agent descending the stairs and walking in between the machines to gather a bit of paper. More specifically, it is the agent’s legs which capture Bénazéraf's eye on the stairwell, and as his camera stays static, the actress’s beautiful face comes into focus with a mischievous smile upon her face. Frogmen board the boat for a fight, while the well-dressed dinner guests watch emotionless as the deckhands dispatch the would-be assassins. A long shot of a female walking the shoreline of a beach at night follows, strolling to the soft tunes of the piano score. A phone call in the city and then back to the beach where two lovers descend the rocks to embrace at the bottom. Such a beautiful careless attitude carries L'enfer sur la plage. Bénazéraf loves to show ladies dancing, often slowly and seductively. These aren’t voyeuristic sequences: it’s open: the dancers are willing performers for willing viewers. The young blonde in the bikini eventually boards the boat where the dinner guests staved off two attacks; yet she’s the most successful in infiltrating those aboard. She dances at the side of the dinner table for the host, while the other two lovers take sanctuary at the shore. Atop the deck, the young blonde puts her hooks firmly into the host while casually rocking in a hammock. Chet Baker’s trumpet accompanies her swings. Some more espionage, back-stabbing, and a shoot out end the film. This is sex and violence, French-cinema-sixties style. God bless Bénazéraf."They called you the Antonioni of Pigalle," remarks an interviewer in Immoral Tales, to which Bénazéraf responds, "That's right."

Richard Hilliard's Violent Midnight (1963)

Richard Hilliard's Violent Midnight (1963) is a suspenseful exploitation film whose beauty lies in its execution: the film only remembers to be a thriller when it has to be, despite producer Del Tenney wishing that Violent Midnight had more suspenseful scenes. The film's original title, Psychomania, is evocative of its chief commercial inspiration, but thankfully, the film's theme is overshadowed by its lackadaisical style and perhaps inadvertent meandering and poetic pacing (making its other alternative title, Black Autumn, eerily appropriate. "Black Autumn" is also a folkish song sang by one of the film's female college students with extremely bizarre lyrics with its actress delivering an aloof rendition). Violent Midnight is also highly sensual and risque and the scenes of sexuality within the film were demanded from its distributors. A juvenile delinquent film and a pre-cursor giallo, drive-in entertainment, arthouse style.

Elliot (Lee Phillips) is a Korean War veteran and an artist. His current model, Dolores (Kaye Elhardt), has a strong attraction to him, but Elliot doesn't feel the same way. Leather-jacket clad Charlie Perone (James Farentino) used to date Delores and when he sees Elliot and Delores together at the local dive bar, he picks a fight with the aloof painter. Elliot gives him a beating and probably would have killed him if the fight wasn't broken up by the bartenders. Back at Dolores's pad, Elliot learns that she's pregnant and claims that the child is Elliot's. He splits. Dolores is murdered by a figure with black gloves in black boots. Elliot's half-sister, Lynn (Margot Harman), arrives after quite a few years away from her brother (the father the two shared biologically died years before in a mysterious hunting accident) to attend the local women's college. Elliot takes Lynn to the college and while there, he captures the eye of sultry vixen, Alice St. Clare (Lorraine Rogers); but his artist's eye and heart is captured by sweet-natured Carol Bishop (Jean Hale). Cool. Lieutenant Palmer (Dick Van Patten) meets Elliot outside the college to interrogate him about Dolores' murder. Not cool.After Dolores's opening murder, perhaps it was more me, the viewer, than Hilliard or Tenney who forgot that Violent Midnight is a murder mystery, only because the film's allure is watching this disparate group of people in a small Connecticut town interact and hang out. (Although Richard Hilliard is the credited director, Tenney reveals during the audio commentary on the DVD that Violent Midnight was the first film that he produced and directed. Hilliard is the credited director, according to Tenney, because Tenney "didn't want to take all of the credit.") Too much eye candy is on display and scenery-chewing becomes the norm, despite Dick Van Patten's character popping in on every one to remind them that a murder has occurred. Elliot lives in his artist's retreat, a castle (a studio in Connecticut, according to Tenney). The local dive bar looks like a garage turned juke-joint while the tenement houses where Charlie Perrone lives (along with his sometimes gal, Silvia (Sylvia Miles in a scene-stealing performance)) are the stereotypical homes from "the other side of the tracks." Finally, there's the women's liberal arts college where everything just seems rosy despite one of the professors being a fairly overt peeping tom.In all of these fantastic locations, the characters of Violent Midnight sashay around the scenery. Elliot is a square only because his character has to stay flat in order to provide some mystery around the murders. Farentino's Perrone is a cross between James Dean and Marlon Brando from Rebel Without a Cause to The Wild One to A Streetcar Named Desire, all filtered down to cool motorcycle riding, languid posing, and handsome-man mugging. Charlie's a chump, though. The ladies of Violent Midnight are the real attraction: from Miles's wonderful tough-girl character to Harman's Lynn (Tenney's wife who also contributed to the story). Her first meeting with Elliot at the train station is memorable, as it looks like little sis has gotta thing for older brother. Hale's Carol and especially Rogers's Alice are the highlights. I've always loved the bad girls in film and Rogers fits the role to a tee. She drinks and smokes, wears the most provocative bathing suit, fancies a shag in the laundry room or by a moonlit lake, and generally exudes sexuality in every scene. Truly sex on wheels. Pretty Carol, as portrayed by Hale, is Donna Reed in high-water pants, smart, sassy, and sweet. Dick Van Patten is a "just the facts, ma'am" and he is terrific.The plot of Violent Midnight just really gets in the way, but I love murder mysteries so when the film wants to play detective, I'm game. Despite the fact that there are no real clues and it's kind of obvious who's a red herring and who's a genuine suspect, watching Van Patten interact with all of the characters was fun enough. The giallo-esque black gloves and atmospheric killings remind all of us how influential Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) truly was. Sexuality and psychology became the background for killings, and Violent Midnight is in this vein. Van Patten tells Silvia and Charlie at one point, "Hey lady, you've been holed up in here for nineteen hours. Even turtles got to come up for air." Sums up Violent Midnight, perfectly.All objective facts about the production are from Del Tenney's audio commentary included on the Dark Sky Films's DVD.

Herman Yau's Taxi Hunter (1993)

Kin (Anthony Wong), despite his nerdish attire, which includes glasses and short-sleeves and a tie, is a highly-resourceful and successful insurance salesman. The very definition of mild-mannered, he's also very kind; and his wife (Perrie Lai) is expecting their first child. Kin's future bodes well. Chung (Rongguang Yu) is a stellar, superhero cop, very good-looking and also resourceful. Chung is very much happy for his friend Kin and his wife. On the way home from the office after learning that he is due for a promotion, Kin gets into a minor car accident with a taxi cab. Obviously a scheme, the taxi driver calls two of his friends and forces Kin to pay up a sum of money immediately to settle the claim. With his car damaged, Kin and his wife become dependent on the taxis in and around Hong Kong, and taxi drivers are not nice folks: they demand higher fares for particular destinations, refuse to go to particular destinations completely, and are generally distasteful and grumpy people. One evening during a rainstorm, Kin's wife begins to bleed and immediately grasps her abdomen. Kin summons a cab via phone, and his good fortune runs cold: the initial cab driver sneaks another fare for a higher sum and leaves Kin and his wife stranded...A second cab comes along and refuses to take Kin's wife to the hospital, because "she'll bleed all over the taxi." Adding fatal injury to insult, the cab driver in a mad dash to leave, accidentally drags Kin's wife several feet, killing her and her unborn child. Wong's Kin begins to see the world a little differently after that evening, and within his sights, he takes on the city's taxi drivers in Herman Yau's Taxi Hunter (1993). Chung's assigned to the case and is determined to find who's targeting the taxi drivers. From the opening frame, it is quite obvious that Taxi Hunter is a playful take on Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and much purer in its exploitation elements. Like Taxi Driver, Taxi Hunter is buttressed by a stellar performance by its leading man, Anthony Wong, whose character takes a very sharp turn into psychosis and doesn't look back. Wong's Kin is initially a sympathetic character but when he becomes the taxi hunter, Kin's intense and brutal. "What is your main reason for taking a certain role?" asks an interviewer (from Cine East by Miles Wood, FAB Press, 1998). Anthony Wong responds, "Money. Most are just for money." The interviewer follows up this question with another to Wong: "Are there any you've done for other less mercenary reasons?" Wong responds, "Some. Taxi Hunter. I think that's an interesting film. It's by the same director as The Untold Story, Herman Yau. We changed the script, and worked on the dialogue every night to make it more interesting." Herman Yau has this to say about his leading man (from an interview with Yau included in Asian Cult Cinema, No. 35, Vital Books, 2002): "Anthony Wong is a good friend of mine. We've been friends for nearly 18 years. He acted in my film when I was a film student. I think he is a very talented actor, and maybe the best contemporary actor of our time. He's very creative and has his own characteristics."
Wong gives a fantastic performance, and he and Yau really take the time during the exposition of Taxi Hunter to make his character, Kin, innocuous, sympathetic, and timid. In fact, Wong's character and how he performs his job (cutting breaks on premium payments to customers, for example) make him the very personification of not tough. The stereotypical nerdish outfit, glasses and short-sleeves and tie, only reinforces this notion, as he looks like someone who could be pushed around at will. It's a clever set-up for Wong's transformation, and in a pivotal scene, Wong's Kin is sitting alone on some outside steps, eating lunch from a styrofoam container. He looks sad and dejected as his wife has just died. Kin watches as a woman is being berated by a taxi driver. Kin doesn't drop his lunch or even finish chewing the mouthful that he has but confidently strides across moving traffic and slaps the taxi driver forcefully across the face. As the title suggests, the taxi drivers become Kin's prey. Kin's "hunting" scenes are brilliant sequences of exploitation: Yau and Wong craft one that's particularly impulsive and kinetic; another which is quite humorous and a play on a famous scene in Taxi Driver; and one that is ice cold and brutal.
As Wong noted from the excerpt from his interview above, he found Kin's character interesting. The interviewer from Asian Cult Cinema remarks to Yau during his interview corroborating Wong's statement and asks Yau: "What motivated you to make that film [Taxi Hunter]?" Yau responds, "It is not based on a true story, but, besides the killing revenge of Anthony, characters and some of the incidents are based on real persons that I know and incidents that I have experienced. You know why I made up my mind to have a driving license? It was because I didn't want to get into a taxi anymore. I've had very bad experiences taking taxis and the bad experiences were put into the movie." No doubt that Yau wasn't alone in bad experiences with taxi drivers, and Taxi Hunter appears to take a perverse thrill in enacting its revenge upon those characters with a sympathetic public. In one scene, Wong pulls off a brutal murder in front of a very elderly would-be taxi passenger. Her reaction to Wong's murder and the statement that she gives to the police are reflections of the public sympathy that Yau is attempting to elicit.
As Wong's character, Kin, makes a fascinating character study, Yau remembers that Taxi Hunter is also an entertaining exploitation film. Yu's Chung is the vehicle for the dramatic action as he and his partner, a bumbling homeboy, Gao (Ng Man Tat), begin investigating the taxi driver killings. Yau even drops a would-be romance between Gao's daugter, Mak (Athena Chu), and Yu. Not only do these scenes drive the dramatic action with the investigation but they also serve as a foil to Wong's intense performance: Yu is the good-looking, righteous cop; Gao provides the slapstick humor; and Mak is the sassy, sweet, and beautiful lady who rounds out and spices up the cast. I have never found fault in Yau's direction of action sequences or how his films appear visually: Taxi Hunter is another example of his creative talent in both of these facets. As the film has a hodgepodge of motifs, focused primarily upon Wong's intense character, Yau changes his visual style to match each: the night scenes with Wong are very dark and brooding, while, for example, the scenes with Yu's Chung are shot primarily in the day (Chung's signature white t-shirt and Adonis-like physique not only counterbalance Wong's appearance but make him much more an "angelic" hero.)The recent DVD release by Discotek Media of Taxi Hunter looks terrific in anamorphic widescreen. The only fault of the release is the lack of supplements (which I always love, like interviews and commentaries). A collection of cool trailers is included along with English subtitles for the feature (and chapter stops). All quotes from Wong and Yau are from their interviews, respectively, from their sources as quoted from within.

Herman Yau's Nighmares in Precinct 7 (2001)

Jing (Andy Hui) is a good-looking, young, and arrogant cop. As he is being toasted at a party for one of his recent successes, he gives a false speech about how grateful he is for the help of his team and his superiors. With voice-over narration, Jing reveals that he really thinks everyone around him is an idiot and only wants to stay close to him to reap the benefits of his successes. He has little time for his cute girlfriend or for his mother and could care less about impressing any of the top brass. The following day Jing and his crew of three are performing a stakeout of a group of violent criminals. One of his crew Jap (Simon Lui, also co-writer) tells Jing that the criminals are about to exit and that they should wait for backup before advancing upon them. Jing dispenses with the backup and orders his crew to take the criminals down. Two of the officers are killed, Jap is injured, and Jing takes a bullet into the back of his skull inducing a coma.

Two years later and pretty nurse Miss Oscar (Loletta Lee) is attending to bed-ridden Jing whose eyes finally open. In the interim of his sleep, Jing learns that his mother has died, his girlfriend has moved on with her life, and that he has a new ability: a sixth sense, the ability to see ghosts around him and interact with them. Jing kindles a friendship with ghost Kit (Tat-Ming Cheung) who teaches him about the supernatural world. Jing's first assignment upon return to the police force is to arrest a serial rapist and killer who targets young nurses. Pretty Miss Oscar, who has fallen in love with her patient, Jing, according to Kit, has a shortened life line; and Jing thinks that she is the next victim...

Despite its English-language title that suggests a singular location with perhaps some spooky, paranormal events going on, Herman Yau's Nightmares in Precinct 7 (2001) is, by all appearances, a star vehicle for its leading man Andy Hui. Hui's character, Jing, is the focus, and Hui gets the opportunity with Yau and Lui's screenplay to work the dramatic range. Hui plays a hero who learns a little humility along the way and the value of help from others. Nightmares has action, comedy, drama, romance, mystery, and just a smidgen of horror. Very broad in its approach, Yau's film is unfortunately very average.

Lee's Miss Oscar is super cute and super sweet and watching her have a blossoming, shy romance with Hui's Jing was endearing at times. However, as Hui's character grows during the film, Lee's character doesn't change focus and grow at all, a true wasted opportunity. Miss Oscar is such a likable character and the potential to engage the viewer's interest could have been heightened, as it's almost telegraphed that she is the killer's next victim. Instead, Lee's character pops up in the final two-thirds of the film, as needed, for either a romantic scene with Hui or, in one of the rare scenes where Hui is absent from the screen, a target for the killer. The mystery behind the identity of the killer is fairly mediocre: the rapist/killer has eluded the police for two years (while Jing was sleeping), and soon after Hui takes over the case, he makes an associational link with the killer's patterns which seems quite obvious and that the police would have to be fairly careless not to notice. Hui's scenes with Cheung's Kit are somewhat humorous, yet Hui can't really pull off any comedy. In fact, Jing's supernatural ability is essential to the storyline but it feels like a gimmick that could be done without. The only aspect of the film which truly stands out are Yau's action scenes, which I'm convinced that Yau could direct while sleeping. During the opening action sequence and in a chase scene involving the always welcomed Suet Lam, Yau delivers his kinetic and exciting camera work and some nifty touches, as when the criminals discover the police's identity during the stakeout. Too little action, however, to recommend the film for these scenes. As for horror, the viewer can blink and miss all of those.

Finally, the ending was going for the exact opposite of comedy yet it had me laughing quite hard for its ridiculousness. An extremely average Herman Yau film, Nightmares in Precinct 7 is only for his extremely die hard fans.

Sogo Ishii's Labyrinth of Dreams (Yume no ginga) (1997)

Film maker Sogo Ishii is a true aesthete yet does not take visual storytelling literally. His films are stories told with images and they are often quite stunning. Perhaps, the most powerful aspects of his cinema come from subtle flourishes which undercut, compete, or overshadow the images on screen. His punk rock flicks, however, like Crazy Thunder Road (1980), Burst City (1982), or Electric Dragon 80000 V (2001), for example, cannot be described in this manner, but his Labyrinth of Dreams (Yume no ginga) (1997) very much can be. Shot in black and white in a rural, quiet setting, little dialogue is spoken, where the emotion lies in the compositions and charged within its characters.

Tomiko (Rena Komine) is a bus conductor whose friend, Tsuyako (Tomoka Kurotani) was engaged to be married to Nikata (Tadanobu Asano). Tsuyako died before her marriage. In letters to Tomiko, she confesses fear of Nikata, as if she believes her fiance wants to murder her. Nikata is a bus driver, and recently there was a collision involving a bus and a passing train with deaths resulting from within the bus. Double suicide? reads the newspaper. A bus conductor and driver is a symbiotic relationship: the driver focuses solely upon driving his passengers to safety while the conductor collects tickets, announces stops, and most importantly at train crossings guides the bus safely across the tracks, warning the driver of approaching trains. Tsuyako was a bus conductor, and the driver was Nikata. Now Nikata is the new driver and Tomiko is the conductor upon his route.The image, the first image of Asano as Nikata, comes from the eyes of Tomiko as she spies him sleeping on the train tracks apparently unaware of an oncoming train. Tomiko screams, silently as Ishii dispenses with her audio, and stirs Nikata who coolly wakes up to walk off the tracks. Tomiko's eyes are often the focus as Ishii gives her frequent close-ups in Labyrinth, and she speaks loudly with just her looks. Komine's Tomiko stands upright and focused behind the driver's seat on the bus while doing her duty, looking always forward and always slightly behind Nikata who's driving. When the two interact, they are nearly silent and slow interactions with either on the sides of table. Despite any gentleness from the two characters, these scenes are always confrontational. Tomiko falls in love with Nikata and she becomes obsessed with the same obsession as Tsuyako: what is hidden within Nikata and who is he? Tomiko doesn't completely trust Nikata and does not completely trust herself to give herself completely to him. Emotions are most powerfully expressed through letters in Yume no ginga. When a letter is received by a character, it is read aloud to the viewer through voice-over. There's a real intimacy to the words, and it's almost as if Ishii is breaking an unspoken rule, as the culture that is depicted is very quiet and reserved. The substance of the letters are hopes and fears and dreams and doubts. A second letter will follow a first, asking its reader to almost ignore what is written in the first. The timing of the arrival of a letter, especially to Tomiko, is always fortuitous or destined. As Tomiko begins her own correspondence with her friend Chieko (Kotomi Kyono), circularity begins, as if Tomiko is about to walk in the same footsteps as Tsuyako. Ishii penned his script from the novel by Kyuusaku Yumeno, and amazingly, he's able to transform an almost exclusively literary trope to film. Having letters read aloud and watching people read letters is the antithesis of the visual medium, yet Ishii is able to place these scenes seamlessly within Labyrinth. The dramatic conflict comes with his compositions but the emotions are charged with these words.Labyrinth of Dreams feels exactly as its title suggests. There are would-be innocuous scenes of daily routine upon the bus with Nikata and Tomiko. The scenes while driving are funneled for the viewer as if he/she is only able to see what the driver has in front of him. Ishii shows little of that. Tunnels and train crossings are amazingly powerful when they appear and they are shown coldly and symmetrically. Likewise, the shots of the actors are very meticulously composed: where someone is standing or how someone is moving is very important. Then there are some scenes where Ishii lets go into subjectivity. This imagery must come from dreams.

Ti West's Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009)

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009), the sequel to Eli Roth's best film, Cabin Fever (2002), takes place soon after events in the original. There are no spoilers within of Cabin Fever 2 but there are, unavoidably, spoilers for the original movie.

The Good: Joshua Malkin's screenplay from a story by Randy Pearlstein and the film's credited director, Ti West, seeks to continue the original's quirky humor and gross-out gore scenes and place the hijinx in a high-school setting. The narrative of Cabin Fever 2 also sets out from the original to have Cabin Fever 2 a stronger, stand-alone film: only two characters from the original appear, one whom is very much welcomed while the other is almost unrecognizable, and the horror theme of the "contaminated water" tenuously links the two films. Beyond that the film really begins with a blood-stained bus full of students on the way to school while a water truck follows behind. The water was obtained at the same source as in the original, and in a fun animated sequence behind the credits, it is shown how quickly the water is moving in and around town. Cabin Fever 2 moves in closer with its main character, John (Noah Segan) who harbors a serious secret love for Cassie (Alexi Wasser) who just broke up with her arrogant, bully boyfriend, Marc (Marc Senter). It's the morning of the prom, and John and his best friend, Alex (Rusty Kelley) do not have dates...yet. The dialogue is well-written, and the characters are well-drawn. All the scenes within the first half of the film are energetic and fun with likable characters with each actor giving an enthusiastic performance. There is a real attempt by the participants to evoke a classic sense of teen comedy from older films. John, Alex, and Cassie are likable characters, and it is easy to watch them. John, especially, is a refreshing character, as he seems to wear his heart on his sleeve. Even the gross bits induce a chuckle, especially a sequence involving Alex in a restroom. The Bad: Eventually in Cabin Fever 2 the gore scenes take over the film. Throughout the whole film, it doesn't feel as if any of the film participants are making any genuine attempts at scares. Those fun characters from the first half slip into victim mode, making the first half seem like just a vehicle to get the viewer to a gross-out finale, rather than creating likable characters. After the first half of the film, some of the violent scenes get really brutal and seem out of place for a film that has such an overall air of light fun. Cabin Fever 2 ends more than once, by the way.

The Ugly: Cabin Fever 2 suffers from a serious schism: little motifs and bits from lots of types of films thrown together in a non-organic way. The film's credited director, Ti West, reveals in an interview here and from a news report here (which corroborates what is related here) that he apparently butt heads with the producers (the IMDb lists sixteen people holding a producer credit on the film) over which direction to take the film. The end result is a film that is undeniably fun at times yet wholly unsatisfying.

Ti West's Trigger Man (2007)

Ti West directed, edited, shot, co-produced and wrote Trigger Man (2007) after another production didn't work out. He approached Larry Fessenden, who produced his debut feature-length film, The Roost (2005), with another idea, which West describes as an "experimental horror movie" without any horror conventions like "jump scares." Trigger Man, also, would be a film where the viewer would never see the killers' point of view. West's script was based on a location, one "right behind the house where he grew up" in Delaware. The film was shot in seven days in sequential order with an eighteen-page script with an "inexpensive HD camera that Larry Fessenden owned" with no improvisation from its main three actors who were not professionals. Its story is about three young male friends who reunite in New York City and take a trip out into the woods for hunting. While there, they encounter what looks like an abandoned factory where a sniper has holed up with his sight upon them.

West takes risks with his cinema, as his filmography shows, and often his risk-taking alienates most viewers. Trigger Man flows from the Dogme school of filmmaking and is, more or less, faithful to its manifesto: natural light, organic shooting, primarily handheld, minimal plot and character exposition, and minimal music. Combined with the Dogme influence is West's conscious attempt to make an "experimental" horror film: no foreshadowing, no dramatic music to heighten tension (no attempts, period, to create artificial tension) and no atmospheric flourishes to create foreboding. West's primary artistic tools to create a successful horror film are his compositions, the intimacy that he creates with his viewer with the action, and the sound design by Graham Reznick.West's compositions are excellent. The opening title sequence of Trigger Man with a static shot of a New York skyline at dawn with Reznick's disorienting sound design accompanying the on-screen title appearance gives the film a feel like something out of American cinema in the 1970s. Likewise the initial shots of the interior city streets of New York are shot through a windshield of a moving car, giving the film a gritter feel like a crime flick or Midnight Cowboy. When the three characters unite at the beginning of the film, initially the shooting style already makes the viewer feel as if he/she is in New York and knows these characters. The handheld shooting style with only natural light gives an intimacy to the proceedings like a documentary or a home movie. When the action moves to the Delaware woods, it is a jarring juxtaposition from modern man-made structures to lush greenery. As the predominant color is green, West plays with the shooting of the focus of the foreground and the background in the action. Something innocuous will be in focus in the foreground while the three hunters, with their bright orange hunting vests, move fuzzily in the background. The dramatic action of Trigger Man will be the most divisive aspect of the film for viewers. There is no audience character and there are no attempts to elicit sympathy. The viewer is kept out of the action as an observer. Not only does the documentary-like, Dogme shooting style emphasis this, but also West's script and direction. West attempts to bring his viewer close to the action but not within the characters. Sean (Sean Reid) tells his city buddies, Reggie (Reggie Cunningham) and Ray (Ray Sullivan), that hunting takes patience. Likewise, the viewer is going to have to patient with West's pacing: the viewer is another (yet silent) guest in this hunting party and has to wait, like the hunters, for some action. The quiet moments and the deliberate pacing no doubt emphasize the subsequent intense scenes; and as the film unfolds, Trigger Man becomes quite intense and often quite violent.Trigger Man is set over the course of one hunting day, and occasionally a title card will appear in documentarian fashion revealing the time. It has a stripped-down narrative and accompanying shooting style. West says that sound design is very important in a horror film. Likewise, his use of Graham Reznick's sound design is perhaps his most elaborate. West creates a delicate balance: in attempting to keep the viewer slightly off-balance, West uses odd, unnatural audio cues throughout the film to create a disorienting effect. The audio, at times, doesn't seem to belong in any film and when used, its effective. It has a quality of adding an alien feeling to natural scenery or creating an unnatural feeling in a modern setting, like the factory or the city.Ti West is one of the most interesting young film makers currently working for the sole fact that his cinema is completely against the grain. No doubt, I certainly admire artists who are risk-taking, progressive, and playful like West. West's "experimental horror film" is certainly worth seeing for the curious, and as to whether its a successful experiment, it's up to the viewer. All objective facts about the production within are from a cast and crew Q and A from the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2007 included as a supplement on the Kino DVD of Trigger Man and also from West and Reznick's audio commentary also included upon the disc.