Product: Nutbag: The Story of the Vegas Ripper (2000)
Rating: 1.0
You can fit the talent in this movie in a...
Nutbag (Nick Palumbo, 2000)Nutbag is one of those movies that was on my Amazon wish list for so long I forgot why I originally put it there. Now that I've finally gotten around to watching it, I have some vague memory of thinking that the premise--getting inside the mind of a serial killer and following him around--was a good one. After all, when it's done right (think Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer here), it's fantastic stuff. Nutbag, on the other hand, is not fantastic stuff in any way.When you aim to get inside someone's mind, you really need some kind of character development. In order to make a good film of it, however, you not only have to develop the character of your killer, which Palumbo does (however cliché his insights into his killer's psyche may be), but you have to develop some other characters as well. This is something Palumbo never gets around to doing, as no one else in the film is around long enough to be developed; it's a series of murder set pieces (to borrow the title of one of Palumbo's later works) with nothing connecting them except the killer. Each one is expressly designed to give us another piece of the killer's psyche, as well as adding to the movie's quotients of breasts and blood. While there's certainly fun to be had with breasts and blood when done correctly, this is in no way a definition of "correct". Killer kills. Killer pontificates. Killer stalks. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Over and over again for what seemed like the longest seventy-five minutes of my movie-watching life. And to give the script what credit it deserves, had a really good actor played the killer, someone who could make those moments of pontificating into scenes that could bring us into some sort of empathy with the character, it might have worked in some way. Mack Hail, who plays the killer, is not a really good actor, nor even a mediocre one. He has two settings, deadpan and rage, and neither one is appropriate for the more introverted scenes that pepper the movie.This is one to avoid. *