2 out of 5

Director: Josh C. Waller

I’m down with exploitation movies that are made knowing what’s what.  ‘What’s not always a good thing, of course, but a director or writer can run with the knowledge that it ain’t exactly art and flip it on its head to make something really fun or, rarely, subversively effective at expressing something beyond its genre.

Josh C. Waller isn’t a fan of exploitation, according to an interview he gave about ‘Raze.’  I don’t know how Hollywood or indie Hollywood works, but let’s say that ‘Raze’ floats around, it needs a director, and someone had Josh Waller in mind due to a music video or short or something and made the call.  You’re not at a point to turn down projects, so you accept even though you don’t dig the scene, exactly, stating to yourself that you’re going to make the best of it.  And thus we get to the muddy waters of exploitation, where the ‘what’ in this case ends up being defined by someone trying to hard to deny what they’re making.  You could say ‘Raze’ doesn’t sidestep its violence, which would be part of its women-in-prison genre, but it tries to elevate it into… gender commentary, maybe, or plumbed emotional depths, and it just ends up hollowing out what otherwise could’ve been crassly fun or brutally challenging.  And if you’re going to go for the ‘elevate the medium’ tactic, then I think you owe it to your viewer to generate some type of internal logic.  ‘Martyrs’ was a different genre, and probably a larger budget than this, but I cannot underline the sense of astonishment I felt when the film opened up in its second sequence, building and building upon its mysteries but holding on to the film’s logic, which prevents us from asking ‘those’ questions which will ruin our suspension of disbelief.  I reference ‘Martyrs’ here because of its base in violence, its initial puzzle pieces, and then its expansion upon the definitions of that puzzle…  ‘Raze’ could be said to follow this very general formula: girls beating girls to death in a bricked-in fighting ring; mentions of people for whom they have to fight (and are being filmed) else their loved ones be killed; and finally exploring those nebulous ‘people,’ – with, I should add, much creepy potential with the casting of Doug Jones as patriarch and Sherilyn Fenn as matriarch.  Alas, there’s no mystery.  Despite there being some society that has the funds and means for running this shindig, it’s exactly what you think it is: chicks fighting chicks for entertainment.  Okay, meta, they’re filmed, we’re watching a film, Sherilyn Fenn’s defense of the process by stating that it’s exactly because she’s a woman that she does this… but that’s almost all, entirely, given with the premise.  I’ll give Waller credit for splicing the fights in effectively – they’re edited such that its not as repetitive as it could be, focusing on the violent beatings for punctuation when needed: our intro fight, a fight that kills off a main character, etc. – and, in general, its directed without unnecessary flash and I’m big on duo-toned, simple set design, with our prison cells and fighting pit cast in cold greys or harsh reds.  But his take on screenwriter Robert Beaucage’s tale doesn’t give our girls much to do except look tough or pout, this regrettably applying to Ms. Bell as well, whom I really want to see given some meatier material with which to work at some point.  That’s not to say these mostly actresses (as in non-fighters) don’t pull off the tough stuff, which would’ve been an unforgivable sin otherwise – only Rebecca Marshall, playing Phoebe, our expected wildcard who doesn’t want to escape this ’cause she loves her some killin’ – hams it up a bit too much – just that the dour tone reeks of whatever Waller was aiming for, but nothing else on screen supports it.  Jones and Fenn don’t get enough room to make their parts evil enough or creepy enough, and nasty warden ‘Kurtz’ has a weird pre-final moment that could’ve been played for so much more depth but is just a pause before a piss-out.

Which summarizes the end of the movie as well.

If you can watch it strictly as a flick without aspirations, ‘Raze’ does a great job with its budget and doesn’t bore during its 90 minutes.  It will probably surprise for how lacking in exploitation it is, given its premise, but its this that tips you off that it wants to be something more… and that’s when you start asking those questions…