5.9 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
An exotic dancer seeks revenge on the five men who assaulted her.
Starring: Julin, Nick Manning, John Gabriel (XIX), Jeremy James Douglas Norton, Denise WilliamsonAction | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 2.0 | |
Video | 2.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, which would seem to suggest that a warmed over feature like Cherry Bomb might not be the freshest treatment of a vengeance theme imaginable. While its filmmakers insist they wanted to craft an homage to John Carpenter and rustle up a little sex and violence in the process, Cherry Bomb is a reductive and derivative exercise in a subgenre of revenge films built around the central initial crime of rape. Cherry Bomb’s titular character is a stripper-dancer (played by Julin Jean) who agrees to give one of her stripper friends the night off by working a private party. That turns out to be a really bad decision, as a quintet of lowlifes let Cherry work her wiles on them and then return the favor by viciously raping her. This being a revenge film and all, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the local police force doesn’t exactly go out of its way to arrest the men, and so Cherry sets out to exact some justice herself, along with some help from her brother Brandon (John Rodríguez). The rest of the film plays out pretty much exactly as you’d expect it to: Cherry and Brandon track down the culprits and dispatch them with a variety of blood splattered means, with nary a feeling of remorse or regret getting in the way. Along the way they find themselves being chased by a seemingly superhuman hit man named Bull (Allen Hackley), who for some initially undetermined reason is out to get them even as they are out to get the rapists.
Cherry Bomb is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. The other claim to fame Cherry Bomb has (aside from its "fantastic" dramatic debut by porn star Nick Manning) is that it evidently is the first feature shot for the most part with a Canon 7D. This is not a camera one would normally associate even with HD digital video, and the results are not exactly spectacular. The overall appearance here wavers somewhere between an 8mm and 16mm look, quite grainy a lot of time, with a general softness that verges on blurriness in several scenes, and with often wildly inconsistent contrast (some of which seems to have been intentionally tweaked in post). Whether the camera itself or some digital manipulation in post is the culprit, there are a couple of totally odd and ugly "streaking" moments in the film, where the image simply seems to dissolve or looks like its been airbrushed somehow. Though it's hard to make it out in the screencap, take a look at screencap 5 and notice the weird discoloration toward the top of the roofline. In motion, that discoloration flares and smears across the screen, almost in a quasi-posterizing effect. Screencap 6 also shows how almost surreal some footage in the film tends to appear in passing. In decently lit scenes, fine detail pops at at least agreeable if not overwhelming levels, and colors are acceptably saturated in these moments as well. Darkly lit scenes (which comprise a lot of this film) are simply awash in crush with extremely poor contrast.
Cherry Bomb's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is rather surprisingly well done, considering the lo-fi ambience of the film, with generally consistent and convincing surround activity and some extremely boisterous and well utilized LFE. The chaotic ambience of the strip club is well handled in the establishing scenes, and once Cherry and Brandon go on their rampage, sound effects increasingly paint the soundfield with some nicely bombastic use of discrete channelization. There's some good use of source cues here, good ol' bass heavy rock that ups the low end considerably. Dialogue is occasionally nicely directional as well, and fidelity remains strong throughout this enterprise.
Cherry Bomb certainly isn't as bad as it might have been, but that doesn't mean it's very good. The film would have done much better to have just gone for broke and played this all for laughs. As it is, it's a kind of scattershot entry that has moments of effectiveness undercut by its own inconsistencies. The cast is game (Julin looks rather like an attractive combination of Angelina Jolie and Michelle Rodriguez), but this film is so completely predictable it begins to wear out its welcome fairly quickly. The gimmick of shooting this with a Canon 7D also seems in retrospect not to have been the brightest idea, as the image quality here is remarkably drab and has some truly bizarre anomalies. Still, grindhouse fans may get a kick out of this, at least as a rental.
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