By Jamie Brownlie
To quote Operation Ivy, “Here we go again.”
Six friends on vacation in Lithuania meet the exotic Luta at a party. Two of them decide to follow her back to the tattoo parlor where she works to get work from The Artist, the master tattooist. Torture ensues and it all caps off with an incredibly improbable and displeasing ending.
I’m not a dick, I swear to God I’m not. I know my ex-wife and probably quite a few of my friends are somewhere rolling their eyes, but it’s true. I don’t write these reviews to be a dick. I don’t get any sort of satisfaction out of slamming the hard work of others, it’s quite the opposite actually. I want to like every movie I see. Big budget, low budget, no budget: I want to love them all. I yearn for that escape one gets when losing themselves in a movie. Sadly, I haven’t reviewed a movie yet for BAH that I loved. There’s been one that I sort of liked, one that I wanted to like and two that I hated.
The Parlor or Anarchy Parlor (horrible, horrible name) as it was originally released almost got me. For the first thirty minutes or so I thought that maybe BAH had finally sent me a movie I could get behind. It’s beautifully shot and features some great acting from its antagonist, The Artist (played spectacularly by Robert LaSardo). Then it all just sort of falls apart.
This is torture porn, through and through. We’re treated to repeated scenes of victims having their skin slowly and excruciatingly removed from their bodies, in very realistic graphic detail. If you’ve read my other reviews on BAH you’ll know I’m not a fan of the torture genre. I don’t mind gore. I don’t mind graphic killing. Hell, I honestly don’t even mind a movie that uses torture as a device to further the plot, but even this old desensitized horror hound can’t and won’t enjoy the slow prolonged torture of others, even in a celluloid setting. I don’t get off on it.
But that’s neither here nor there when it comes to the actual quality of the movie in question and if truth be told, from a technical standpoint, it’s extremely well done. Besides, as I mentioned earlier, being well shot, the sound is perfect, the lighting is perfect, the set dressing is excellent, and it uses the native beauty of the Lithuanian setting wonderfully. When one looks at it with these things in things in mind, it holds up to any movie I’ve seen in quite a while. However, when you get into the more creative aspects, like the script and acting, it’s definitely behind the curve.
The acting is all over the place with most of it on the bad end of the spectrum. Since it was actually filmed entirely in Lithuania, I’m assuming they hired all of the non-featured actors locally and it shows. It’s mostly stiff and amateurish. The leads are somewhat better, although they play stereotypes so their portrayals are pretty much predefined. The arrogant jerk is adequately jerky, the meek friend is perfectly meek and the douchebag is punch-in-the-face douchebaggy. The two female leads, not including the final girl, are interchangeable and really don’t do much in or for the movie besides show their boobs and die horribly.
The antagonists are the movie’s strong point. Robert LaSardo is great as the Artist. He plays the film’s bad guy with a cool calmness that is a refreshing change from the usual over the top psycho we see in most movies of this type. He brings a low-key professionalism to the role that helps elevate the movie to a level above what it deserves. Also of note is Sara Fabel, playing the role of Luta. While not the greatest actress, she is so smoking hot (Google Image her, you won’t be disappointed) and so perfect as the tattooed psycho apprentice of the Artist that you can’t help but think about her after the movie ends. Of course, the fact that she is, as mentioned, smoking hot and spends most of the movie either naked or scantily clad helps in that regard.
Sadly, for all the good brought to the table by our antagonists, it’s all washed away by the script. I mentioned earlier that the characters are all stereotypes, and it’s to a point that is painful. Everyone is in such a defined role that nothing they do is a surprise and plot twists are seen coming from a mile away. Plus, with the exception of one of the secondary female leads, all of the characters are pretty much completely unlikable. As a writer, if you want your audience to feel any sympathy for your characters as they’re being tortured, you have to develop an emotional attachment for us to cling to. That attachment wasn’t there so I never really felt sorry for them, I just felt uncomfortable as I watched them slowly flayed.
Mostly, I found it boring with it dragging horribly in its middle act, and with an ending that made no sense that I felt was unnecessary and out of place. I also kept thinking it was overly long but it comes in at the industry standard 90 minutes. It did feature some of the hottest strippers I’ve seen in a movie, so I guess it’s got that going for it.
Watch it if you like this sort of thing, otherwise avoid it like the plague.
Anarchy Parlor is available now for on-demand and download in the US, via Gravitas Ventures.