Rushlights Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.5

Rushlights Blu-ray Movie Review

Dimwits

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 19, 2013

A "rushlight" is a makeshift candle formed (as the film's opening quotation informs us) by dipping the "pith of a rush into tallow". A more suitable quote might have been the Aesop's fable in which a rushlight brags that it is brighter than the sun, just before it is blown out by a puff of wind. It's a fitting metaphor for writer/director Antoni Stutz's Southern gothic would-be noir, whose sputtering flame is repeatedly doused by absurdity throughout its 96-minute running time. Stutz is described in the accompanying featurette as a director who "knows exactly what he wants", but unfortunately what he wants appears to be nothing more than striking shots and impressive sound design. Stutz is apparently one of those directors who thinks that's enough to engage an audience. Never mind that what's happening on screen doesn't add up.

Stutz and co-writer Ashley Scott Meyers have obviously boned up on dangerous romance movies such as Body Heat and its progenitors, as well as small- town murder mysteries (take your pick) and tales of outsiders at war with the locals (e.g., Oliver Stone's U Turn or John Dahl's Red Rock West), but they scavenge random pieces from their sources as if anyone could become Quentin Tarantino by borrowing from other movies. But what makes Tarantino a unique talent is his ability to reinvent what he borrows into an entirely new world that somehow feels organic and credible, even though we know it isn't real. (It's the quality that makes the historical rewrites of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained so seductive.) Stutz can't create the alternate reality of guilt and suspicion into which an effective film noir pulls the viewer. He just strings together arbitrary twists into which his game cast does its best (in vain) to breathe a semblance of life.

Rushlights centers on a drifter named Billy (Josh Henderson, a star of the rebooted Dallas) and Sarah (Haley Webb, The Final Destination ), a waitress and former junkie. They meet, flirt and seven days after their first date are on the run from L.A. after Sarah's roommate, Ellen, dies from an overdose. It turns out, though, that Ellen just received a letter advising her of a sizeable inheritance from Zachary Niles, an uncle she barely knew in the small town of Tremo, Texas. And Billy has noticed something else: Sarah and Ellen look remarkably alike.

Warning bells are sounding in every viewer's head about all these remarkable coincidences, and Stutz has already made his first mistake (it won't be his last). A film about doomed lovers who may be (and probably are) deceiving each others only works if the audience is first drawn into the affair, at least from one side or the other. For a textbook example, watch how Lawrence Kasdan choreographed Matty's and Ned's affair in Body Heat. When you're already wondering who's cheating whom in the first ten minutes of the film, you've detached from the characters and stepped outside the picture. You're never pulled in, and no character gets under your skin.

Nonsense continues to accumulate when the couple reaches Tremo. The lawyer for the estate, Cameron Brogden (Aidan Quinn, who deserves better), appears to accept Sarah for Ellen, but he's curiously vague on basic matters of inheritance law. Among other things, he claims not to know the identity of the surprise challenger to the will who's filed "an injunction" on the ground that he's the illegitimate son of the late Uncle Zachary. Sarah believes she has a clue, having found correspondence to the late benefactor from an unknown woman begging him to recognize their offspring, but the writer's name is missing.

Cameron's older brother, Sheriff Robert Brogden, Jr. (Beau Bridges), takes an instant dislike to Billy, from whom he smells trouble. There's been a rash of petty crime in Tremo lately, and the sheriff doesn't need a new tough guy in town. Sure enough, shortly after Billy and Sarah arrive, the local grocer, Sal Marinaro (Joel McKinnon Miller), has his vehicle stolen from right outside his store. It isn't Billy, though; it's a mysterious prowler (Crispian Belfrage) who heads for the Niles ranch to spy on Billy and Sarah, but gets sent packing by an accidental (or was it?) discharge of one of the late Uncle Zachary's shotguns. Sarah and Billy find Sal's stolen El Camino still parked outside; so what do these criminal masterminds do? They push it into the garage, even though it doesn't take a genius to figure that the sheriff and his deputy, Earl (Jordan Bridges, Beau's son), will check every available structure in this sparse territory once Sal reports the vehicle stolen. (Eventually there's also a body in the trunk, but what's another complication?)

Throw in yet another prowler, who breaks into the house to search for a home-made porno DVD featuring Uncle Zachary with a male farmhand and a mysterious hooded figure; Uncle Zachary's former housekeeper, Belle (Lorna Raver, who played the old gypsy woman in Drag Me to Hell); a spontaneous dispute between Billy and Sal over Sal's mistreatment of his son, Joey (August Emerson); Sarah's relapse into drug use; the inability of Billy or Sarah to grasp, as they wait longer and longer for Sarah to receive Ellen's inheritance, that the authorities back in L.A. are fully capable of ID'ing Ellen's body through fingerprints and dental records; a surprise autopsy report on Uncle Zachary; and a local attorney, Sly Wheaton (Philip Lenkowsky), who has some interesting things to say about the late farmer's estate planning but gets shot before he can say them to the authorities—and that isn't even all of it.

Some of it is germane, and some of it is a red herring, but it's all played at the same level of portentous intensity. By the time everyone finally gets down to standoffs with assorted weapons, I had long since ceased to care, and my guess is you will too.

Rushlights Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

If nothing else, Rushlights looks good. In some shots, cinematographer Gregg Easterbrook seems to have used Edward Hopper's paintings as a reference, isolating human figures in daylight scenes flattened by sun. Vertical Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, provides an apt representation of Easterbrook's work, which was shot on film and finished on a digital intermediate. Blacks are solid and deep, which is crucial for the night scenes and several critical events in dark interiors. The color palette ranges from the ochres and ambers of the dry, dusty fields of the Texas farmlands and town streets to the reddish (in L.A.) and blue-tinted (in Tremo) night interiors where dark deeds may be (and probably are) in progress. Detail is generally quite good, although Easterbrook and Stutz often favor long lenses with a shallow depth of field, so that they can choose which portion of the frame will be in focus and direct the eye accordingly. The film has a fine grain pattern, but you have to look hard to see it; like so many contemporary productions finished on a DI, grain has been minimized without obvious subtraction of detail. With virtually no extras, the 96-minute film fits on a BD-25 without compression errors.

Rushlights Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

If an audio track alone were enough to carry a film, then Rushlights' track, reproduced here in lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1, might do the trick. The sound design shows little interest in naturalistic audio or the recreation of a real environment. Instead, it takes a few elements suggested by the location—insect noises, the creaking of wood, a car's engine—amps them to an extreme and coordinates them with the film's aggressive soundtrack by Jeffrey Coulter (who is also a producer), which has been broken up and separated through the speaker array as if it, too, were part of the sound effects. The Texas flavor remains a recurrent presence on the track thanks to the country-flavored songs of Sean Lane, which he performs both solo and with his band, the Hellhounds.

Rushlights Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The only extra is a brief featurette, Behind the Scenes, The Making of Rushlights (1080i; 1.78:1; 4:11).

Rushlights Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Rushlights looks good and sounds great. It may even have potential as an obscure camp classic. Indeed, for at least half the running time, I seriously entertained the possibility that it was intended as a parody. Alas, no. The actors, who were clearly giving their all, really believed they were in the hands of filmmakers delivering an atmospheric thriller. That kind of thing can be hard to judge on the page, which is why the director's role is critical. Not recommended.