There is something going on in Grizzly Flats, a backwood village in the
middle of nowhere, USA ... but maybe it's nothing more than a dispute
between neighbours: Sylvain (Ryan Karloff) is a scientist from the city
who has moved to Grizzly Flats to conduct some weird and secretive
experiments, and he suspects his hick neighbours (Edgar Allan Poe IV,
Dustin J.Trost, D.J. Shapiro) to have broken into his home and lab
repeatedly, while said neighbours want their privacy on their premises
because they are producing meth by the busload, and they wouldn't even shy
away from shooting Sylvain for trespassing. Sylvain is so caught up in
both his experiments and his neighbourly dispute that he doesn't even see
how his wife Mary Anne (Maggie VandenBerghe), who never liked Grizzly Flats or the country as such to
begin with, is falling apart, which eventually culminates in her adopting
a weirdly shaped pumpkin as her own kid. For a time, she finds solace in
the local priest (Christian Maurice Gantt), but this guy is weird to say
the least. What nobody seems to be noticing at first is that there are
weird shadow being haunting the neighbourhood, least of all the local
amateur-porn shooting sheriff (Judd Nelson), who ironically enough has
actually seen one. Sylvain on the other hand blames everything on his hick
neighbours, especially Posey (D.J. Shapiro) - until he finds Posey dead.
When he finds a stash of self-produced meth next to Posey though - and has
soon developed a healthy meth habit ...
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Now
there's an itneresting approach: Somehow Grizzly Flats feels like a
piece of 1950's science fiction drive-in schlock, if written by David
Lynch - meaning several elements of the film's tried-and-true genre plot
do not actually make sense (and aren't supposed to), and there's some
weird symbolism worked into the story as well as some surreal elements.
Now that might sound like a recipe for disaster, but here it works
beautifully, because while my description of the film might sound a bit
pretentious writer/director Anthony Fankhauser has delivered a totally
down-to-earth, plot- and action-driven, witty and at times (intentionally)
funny movie. Recommended, actually.
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