Hero of the short film and of the current independent cinema, Jim Cummings presents his third feature film, ‘The Beta Test‘, in Filmin. After two extraordinary exercises in cinematographic nihilism, the director teams up with his colleague PJ McCabe in a new film full of the usual hilarious misanthropy and stylized violence.
an LA story
Jim Cummings is gifted. Despite his efforts to make the least exciting thrillers I can remember, his bouts of anxiety and hatred towards the human race come to the fore in this kind of thriller. satirical-nihilistic ulcer of industry from Hollywood.
Jordan Hines, a successful Hollywood agent about to get married, receives an anonymous letter inviting him to a mysterious sexual encounter. Her world will begin to crumble between earthquakes of lies and sinister flows of digital data and a strange succession of heinous crimes.
It doesn’t matter that ‘The Beta Test’ may be, probably, his least round feature film, mainly because the other two, the great ‘Thunder Road’ (also the Filmin) and the delicious ‘The Wolf of Snow Hollow’, had set the bar too tall. Practically impossible. Let no one be alarmed: it is a sensational movie full of evil
And that doesn’t matter because Cummings is still a unique guy when it comes to planning verbal violence and, above all, physical. That the sense of suspense responds to the codes of a bad swimming pool bestseller is almost necessary to degrease a crudeness that refers to the wildest Scorsese. But not only from bad streets and worst nights lives ‘The Beta Test’, almost a giallo 2.0 for our dark present.
The genius behind ‘Thunder Road’ delivers a mid-life crisis between Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk with a third feature film where laughter and anguish take a somewhat different path. ‘The Besta Test’ is raw, horny and surely the American wet dream of the Charlie Sheen or Robert Downey Jr of the mid-eighties.
As always, Cummings pays the same attention to the photography, direction and editing of his film, and does not hesitate to bawl out some extremely forceful dialogue in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. Thus, the industry that the filmmaker shows is one that is willing to do anything to get the most money possible from a public addicted to films that seem to spring from the same mold and that he does not hesitate to give to Tiger Woods a remake of ‘The Wacky Club’ starring dogs.
This descent into hell through a world a control freak can’t even visualize is a great breeding ground for another excellent performance by Jim Cummings, a kind of heir to Jim Carrey with ideas as clear as Clint Eastwood and with a taste for transgression worthy of the greatest priests of the style. And he never offers anything for free.
‘The Beta Test’ is an amoral film about amorality where everything flows in such an organic and natural way that one cannot help but empathize with this Hollywood industry psychopath who allows himself the luxury of blaming ‘Entourage’ for the status these aggressive agents have had for decades with or without Miramax in the middle.
‘The Beta Test’ will be available on Filmin from February 25.