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There has potentially been a surprise victor in the war I’ve been waging with my computer through “dvd player” and VLC. They both have been crashing terribly with DVD’s (and I mean regular retail movies). Sometimes they crash so severely that I need to restart the box to get everything working again… even to get the disc out. I don’t know where the problem lies, but I’ve been thinking that it’s with my combo drive. Well, this week, I tried a different angle.
These days, it seems like there is always a better piece of software out there. Something smaller, with lower memory needs and fewer bloat from features that you don’t use… So I looked around and came across NicePlayer. Yes, it does just nicely. A small piece, only 2.6 mb (10% the size of the other two) with a similar RAM usage… and no unpleasant interface to look at. Anyway, the two DVD’s that I’d been having problems with? It played one them fine, no crashing or failure to eject the disc or anything. So here it is.
First off, join Paddy Considine (writer and star) as he takes a walk in a Dead Man’s Shoes. Picture a nice rural woods and fields scene with two brothers heading cross country for miles. It’s very, very pretty and rustic in a desolate sort of way. The older brother, Richard (Paddy, who I liked in In America, but doesn’t really convince me in this role), had headed off to the army and now he’s back and looking to take care of some old business…
See, the trouble is, when Richard went off to the army, a gang of a half dozen loser drug dealers decided to have fun with his feeble-minded brother. Not torture really, but taking advantage of him, telling him lies, putting him down, feeding him acid, beating him…. Richard aims to return the favor. He’s come to town to tease the poor blokes and make them, maybe, feel a bit vulnerable. Maybe threatened even. This chain of events unfolds as black and white flashbacks unfold his brothers experiences at their hands.
The villains are basically a bunch of loser small time drug dealers with some too-thick accents and the greatest drug dealer ride since King Willy’s Cadillac in Predator 2. The first target, Herbert, doesn’t take anytime at all to realize that the threat of vengeance is in the air. And though that does seem to be the case, through most of the movie is Richard is messing with them. He tries silly frat boys tricks, scary masks and then it really gets fun when he spikes their water for some fun hallucinations (a sequence which I really enjoyed) and then comes by to pay a visit.
The gang leader, Sonny, is terrible in so many ways. Not only is he a bad person, but he is way to weak to be in his position and shows no leadership whatsoever. Remember, in a movie, if someone is out to kill you, and you have a gun that you are willing to shoot, would you shoot, or drive away? But, of course, these guys are the lamest bit of toughs ever put to screen, so I guess it fits.
The movie is very engaging though, it has low action for a brutal revenge movie but it works well. A lot of film of the gangsters hanging around and at one point, when they know he’s after them, there are long, almost comical, scenes of them just hanging around the house, eating soup cups and doing the dishes…
It’s very low-key and low-budget, but not in a bad way. The kind of movie budget that I really respect. Just regular actors (wasting money on “stars” and sets and action scenes is always a waste for a non-genre movie) in some regular rooms with some good blood stuff… Why would anyone need a bigger budget? But I did suffer from the horror-foolishness of, “what on earth is Sonny thinking?” with some of the decision making in the movie. But I highly recommend it for any fun DVD collection. Very well done with some entertaining (albeit lame) characters and a fun story and some good brutal elements.
