Bloody Daisies (2009)

Directors: Cameron Kerr and David E White
Stars: David E White, Catarina de Castro and Cameron Kerr

This film was an official selection at the 3rd Phoenix Fear Film Fest in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

Two men wait with daisies at the same fork in the road in the middle of nowhere. The thinner of the pair is the delightfully named Mitchell Lovenest, neatly but casually dressed and with an old school poet look and long hair. The larger one is Frank Winthrop, who made far less effort to look good with his Kojak T-shirt and shorts. He's early though and it's half an hour before he decides to talk to Mitchell and find out that they're waiting for the same girl, Daisy Tinkelbaum, who then appears out of nowhere and disappears back into nowhere, all without warning. She wants them to do something, but they don't know what. All they know is that there's a spade stuck into the ground in a clearing that wobbles with incentive and they have to figure out what it's for. Of course it becomes clear in the end, with a neat if not entirely unexpected twist to cap it off, but the journey becomes more interesting than the destination.

It's a patently low budget affair (the Dogme concept is cited) with occasionally dubious sound so dialogue can be hard to catch, especially from Catarina de Castro as Daisy, because when she talks she's deliberately obscured, visually and audibly, and it's often a little overdone. She's mostly a prop for the two men to banter against, and they do elevate the story with a notably playful sense of humour that keeps proceedings interesting with flashforwards, flashbacks and imaginary possibilities. The flashbacks are very reminiscent of early Guy Ritchie and the use of sound effects to highlight mood is more like a cartoon. What I found most intriguing is that apart from being thrust into the same situation, the two characters are utterly different, yet they're not just the co-stars of the film, they're the co-writers and co-directors too. What they conjure up runs too long at fourteen minutes, but otherwise is enjoyably quirky.