DVD The Fear of God

Director Michael Fredianelli's religious thriller about a pizza delivery boy framed for a series of murders wants to be many different things: a taut thriller about mysterious evil and a killer running amok, a character study of a conflicted young man dealing with increasingly hazardous circumstances and personal conflicts, and, lastly, an action movie. While it tries to fulfill its tri-fold mission statement, unfortunately, in many areas it fails.

What mostly defeats the otherwise professional-looking production is a script populated with unbelievable characters. So many of Kenny Kitagawa's surrounding co-workers, random strangers, dick-head bosses, scumbags, girlfriends, customers, a hobo, etc. are composites of each other. All equally aggressively hostile, insulting, cartoonish, and often inexplicably violent to Kitagawa's harmless young man. Ironically, the very evil boogeyman who is committing the murders and turning Kitagawa's life into a nightmare seems practically harmless compared to the co-stars. And he's offscreen for most of the movie.

The bloody murders themselves I couldn't comprehend just what they signified or what they were meant to convey. And this carries into Kitagawa's struggle with his Catholicism. Fredianelli's casting of an Asian-American (Michael Nose) as the troubled Kenny is an interesting choice, but is mostly unexplored, thus rendering one scene of Kitagawa's dad running after him, identically explosive and angry at his son (joining the rest of the cast), flat. Other lines of dialogue, addressing the same issue in he movie, like "How's that Catholicism thing working out for you?" don't help things either.

It's possible to put the writing aside and enjoy the movie as a suspense/action vehicle. Nonetheless, the lengthy scenes of dialogue and exposition, (one involving a porno film-maker is excruciating) throw a lot of irritating questions into the mix, one of the chief offenders: "Why does everybody in this city eat overpriced takeout pizza? Especially down and out ex-porno stars and junkies and hobos?" Luckily, there are moments of conflict and violence that are effective, and a standout car-chase at the end is a sharply edited and dramatic. Other action highlights include a hair-raising close-range shootout in a kitchen and a terrifying stunt sequence involving a rabid homeless man and a speeding vehicle.

Performances are decent throughout, with only a few cast members handicapped by their inability to do much beyond harangue and name-call and act like childish pests rather than adults. This does guarantee a certain amount of catharsis in seeing many of them die ugly deaths, especially a brilliant miner's pick-axe assassination in a suburban carport. Standouts are Nose', here managing to overcome what could be a whiny bore whose plight nobody in their right mind would care about, and Aaron Stielstra as a zealot hobo with no economic sense. Also realistic and effectively troubled by the movie's 3rd act is Veronica Valencia as a woman caught up in more than a mere confrontation with evil but a sudden domestic nightmare.

Movie's soundtrack by Aaron Stielstra is properly chilling and accompanies the movie's many strong montages and quieter moments of dialogue with ease and, oftentimes unleashes shrieking John Carpenter-esque shocks.

Overall, the subject matter is an enviable load for Fredianelli to take on in what could have been a flimsy slasher with some mumblings about faith and internalized hate. But to dilute the themes of religion and to one-dimensionalize the outcast stature of a young man in dead-end job, victim to unforeseen criminalization by a killer who, himself, make little sense in his justifications for killing, is a disappointment. The combination of Fredianelli's film-making techniques and his skill at furthering a difficult story to deliver excitement and the movie's best moments of well-paced action and throbbing 80s soundtrack work, definitely doesn't detract from the man's ability to make a solid A-budget thriller. Still worth a watch for its surprises and the efforts made to deliver a B-movie with more than conventional cinematic homicides, a la Brian DePalma, or an exploitation pic.