User Reviews

Triple threat (writer,director,actor) Sirena Irwin is a tour de force in this highly engaging 12 minute dark comedy. Irwin, the director, ignites the viewer's imagination with hauntingly suspenseful cinematography while slapping said viewer down to the ground with one celluloid roundhouse to the buttocks after another. The viewer finds himself not injured but, instead, to have landed successfully each time smack dab on top of his funny bone. Cunningly, Irwin, the writer, sends us off in a cacophony of playful eroticism, lustful innocence and an all too rare gift for understated hilarity. That said, it is Irwin's on screen performance (the actor) that is of most particular note. The fair-haired beauty (think Olivia Newton-John meets Charo) is a duplicitous villainess heavily veiled by a sticky sweet, corn fed naivete and fueled by desirous deception. Had she not written the thing, I would be forced to wonder how such a perfect casting came to pass. Her co-star, Ian Gregory, gives a positively chilling, if unnerving, performance as her paramour-of-sorts. In" Whacked," Irwin has taken the comedy noir oeuvre and cracked it wide open, imbuing it with a contemporary sensibility. That's my time.

The film is only 12 minutes long, so ten lines of comment are as long as the film. But I can write this without any spoiler, I promise: man meets woman in a pay-for-play environment for a bit of light S&M (thus the title, "Whacked"), and conversation an eavesdropper could anticipate even without seeing the film--right up almost to the end. And then, yes, there's a twist. The production values are stilted and somewhat amateurish, with aggressively strong colors supporting a forced dialogue between the two reasonably normal-looking characters. But some odd little things happen during the course of this cinematic exercise and I was left feeling that the filmmakers had a bit of fun making this. So the 12 minutes were not wasted. Just as well it stopped at 12 minutes, though.