1 out of 5

Directed by: Brandon Slagle

“Direct to Video” productions have evolved mightily over the years. Skipping through the details and just going by generalization – and admittedly setting aside the V-Cinema market, except where onesies would’ve proliferated your Blockbuster shelf in a US city – DTV was an exciting hodgepodge of awesome and horrible; a gamble between fun exploitation, passion project, or cash-in, with maybe the ideal some swill of the three.

The straight cash-ins were… a bummer. You’d get enticed by some good copy, a flashy cover, and maybe a star you hadn’t heard of before, but their off-brand lookalike looks appealed. But the end result would be a cheap production without much entertainment factor, even as camp.

The first era of DTV left behind a lot of nostalgia, though, even for the bummers.

Flashing ahead to streaming, when DTV is a lot harder to define, we’re still getting a lot of releases of that flavor, but because spectacle is relatively easier to achieve with cheaper cameras and less computing power needed for effects, a run of okay movies starring kinda movie stars eventually gave way to a glut that kind of mimicked the variations from the original era (exploitation, passion project, etc.), but with so much out there now that it’s hard to really define a brand, the way that, say, Asylum did in the early 00s with mockbusters.

Enter Sonny and Michael Mahal, and their “Mahal Empire.” Enter crowdsourced filmmaking – raising a budget for your film via sites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and showing some proof-of-concepts (or a past history of successes) to get people interested in tossing dollars towards your budget. Everything about the Mahal Empire seeks to really capture that old DTV flair, but from a unique perspective: with Arena Wars as an example, they are going after making cash-in style DTV films, but doing so with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. So we wind up with a very bad movie, but one that feels… innocent in its execution.

I’ve read several reviews of Arena Wars that cop to its quality as bad, but will still praise the production value, and choreography, and acting, and some of the social commentary, I’m here to tell you: no. This movie has two sets. The line reads are likely “directed” by one-word motivations – be angry – and the choreography is grandma speed, with cut-and-paste foley. The “commentary” is milquetoast, “social media sucks” style that you can find in your most broad-appeal variety of anything. Unfortunately, none of this is really shlocky enough to work as camp, or naive enough to be cringe, hence the cash-in concept: where you do enough to coast by in your particular genre, and no more.

With the Mahals, and with this crew, I don’t mean that this is a cash-in, nor do I think it was without effort; I think this is what everyone wanted to make. They wanted to make a cash-in movie, but with passion. And so there are points there, and that might add some charm for you. But it’s really hard to tell the purposeful from the purposeless, and I’m not sure which would be better: is it funny that a random audience member is wearing a stethoscope? Like, if that was tossed in to be funny, am I laughing? Or is it better if the casting call was just, like, ‘choose a profession for your character and bring a tell-tale item.’

Arena Wars combines two overhead city shots with three sets (one with bare, concrete walls and some “metal” posts; one with bare, concrete walls and a blood smear; one with a printed poster of the movie title) and a small cache of actors to redo the Running Man / Death Race format: prisoners are put into a battle royale for money! Some evil corporate types broadcast this to violence hungry crowds, and the costume designer used leftover Halloween masks to dress up the main adversaries who battle our prisoners. (Again, some indirect praise: while the costuming effort looks like “escaped mental patient” Halloween generics, I also fully buy that this was fun and took effort to put together on a non-existent budget.)

Michael Madsen I think was allowed to riff; John Wells, our lead, is pretty wooden; the comedy relief drops prison rape jokes, and there’s further vague homophobia, all of which signals this calling back to the-before-times of DTV, but not in a desirable way in my book. Some casual boobage does the same; not sure where that falls for you.

There’s a large possibility I’ll return to this movie after consuming more Mahal films – as I’m now curious – and spot returning actors and concepts that I’ll praise; kind of like being able to rate Uwe Boll films in reference to each other. And of course, if I was caught up in the crowdfunding cycle, I think seeing the end result would add some kicks. But as a random watch, I have a really hard time believing folks are digging this, as there’s better schlock, absolutely better DTV, and absolutely better variations of this particular plot formula.