Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Sometimes this shit happens... sometimes you let something slip through the cracks. I don't know why I wasn't aware of this flick, the newest from Stuart Gordon. I'm sure info was out there and I just missed it. But damn if the below review doesn't get me all giddy to see this movie. And the Q&A after the flick sounds like it was hilarious! Thanks for the heads up, Copernicus!!!
The midnight crowd roared its approval last night with Stuart Gordon's STUCK. Gordon and co-writer John Strysik based the story on the real-life horrific tale of a nurse who ran into a homeless man, causing him to crash into and get stuck in her windshield. She kept on driving all the way home, and left him to die in her garage. In the real-life story, the man was stuck there for three days, begging her to free him. The first half of the movie is fairly true to life, with Mena Suvari playing the nurse (here called Brandi), and Stephen Rea playing Tom, the man who is really, really down on his luck. Russell Hornsby rounds out the main cast as Rashid, Brandi's boyfriend who helps her deal with the aftermath. At some point the script deviates from true events, but I won't give any of those twists away. This is a different kind of horror. As Stuart Gordon put it after the screening, the truth can be more horrifying than anything you can dream up. There is no stalking murderer, or cheap sudden loud-noise scares, and in that sense the film feels fresh -- with the genre rules gone, you never quite what is going to happen. But don't despair, there was plenty to keep the Midnight Madness crowd screaming and cheering, from gruesome, graphic close-ups of metal and shards of glass digging deeper into the trapped man as he tries to free himself, to a continuation of the penetration theme with Mena Suvari getting high, naked, and laid in the next room. I won't give away the ending, but I will say that it was a real crowd-pleaser. STUCK was independently financed and shot in Nova Scotia. I assume it was shot on the cheap, but you can't tell -- everything looks first-rate. Filming in the Canadian winter adds a blue-gray tint and a bleak, barren look that only contributes to the feeling of cold inhumanity and isolation. I don't know if anyone has distribution rights yet, but given the way it played at midnight, I'd expect it to get picked up very soon. The introduction of the filmmakers and cast, and the Q&A afterward was crazy. Russell Hornsby was baked out of his mind, and made sure to let us know every time he got the microphone. He also picked up Mena Suvari, who was wearing a short dress, and waved her around -- she tried to cover herself, but I think she flashed the audience anyway. She was pretty pissed, but shook it off quickly enough to answer questions. She looks pretty tough now that she's cut off all her hair (seriously, she has a buzz cut), and I bet she kicked Russell Hornsby's drug-addled ass later.
