Product: THREAT: 3 DISC DELUXE EDITION
Rating: 4.0
How the other half lives
Threat is a real indie movie made by a group of kids in NYC over the course of 3 years or so, featuring kids that are black and white, edge and not, all connected by the fact that they're not a part of normal society - the main character's a SXE squatter punk, while his best friend's a well-read black guy with dreads who's trying to support his family. The movie progresses from talks about class wars and race riots as well as debates about nihilistic lifestyles to actually showing people who represent these differences, until finally the conflicting attitudes spark a feral street fight.After watching it, I'm kinda torn on this one. I'm feeling the punk rock context of it, which seeps into the story, the music, the look of the movie, even a lot of the dialogue, which is generally pretty natural-sounding (although there are some scenes that get lost in excessive cussin' or just straight-up inaudible dialogue). I felt a connection to numerous characters here. And yet, the movie wanders from scene to scene, letting the people that inhabit it go to sleep, wake up, talk to each other, hang out ... after a while, it becomes wearisome, especially with a couple of scenes that seemingly have nothing to do with the rest of the movie (newspaper delivery, anyone?). At about an hour in, though, things explode and the movie redeems itself in 15 explosive minutes of unrelenting action and a booty-booting ending (yep, the movie's 76 minutes before credits).This is the single-disc edition, which is professionally-printed and comes in a standard case. Special features include a brief blooper reel, a ton of deleted scenes and explanations why they were excised, and a handful of trailers. I was going to give this 3 stars, but it gets an extra star for being true punk rock (the filmmakers crashed Sundance and found a shoe store willing to show it in order to promote it!). There are numerous faults with the movie, but the filmmakers plainly cared about what they were doing here and put their hearts into it. If you're looking for an indie movie with a better story, you should check out Darren Doane'sGodmoney, but as long as you're into real indie movies and supporting DIY, "Threat" is at least worth a watch.