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But what if we didn't laugh. What if someone took a stand and decided to make a film that almost celebrated these nuts? What if we took a look at life from their point of view instead! Sounds great doesn't it? Well, it's not. It's not even that good actually. Really...it's pretty bad. Townies is that movie...and I'm sorry.
Not so with Townies. The choice to film in black and white is either a homage to Tod Browning's classic Freaks, or it is a vain attempt to lend credibility to a basic work (i.e. Shindler's List...lots of holocaust movies never got recognized because they didn't film in black and white! ahh it could have been so easy). Even worse though is the blurry lines of where this film is going. Is it making fun of the nuts or is it actually trying to show a sympathetic side. I am not exactly sure WHAT the point of Townies was...but I'll try my best to let you know what it is about.
There are two town bullies who enjoy tormenting the freaks by driving them into the middle of nowhere or by trying to persuade them to do irresponsible things. They even go so far as to beat on of the townies up. This gives the movie a chance to show the pain or suffering of being abnormal or different, but instead drops the ball and simply lets one of the townies (some sort of Shaolin Monk/escaped lunatic hybrid) beat them up back! Hah, street justice!
I don't know exactly why I didn't enjoy this movie...it's hard to say for sure. Give this one a try if you really must explore every facet of low budget movie making, but if you are content only watching decent movies go ahead and take a rain check on this one.
-aaron-
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I
have seen a lot of Tempe releases lately...and they have all surprised
me by being much better than I was expecting. It seemed that
each and every one has some quality that sets it apart from the other
B releases that are popping up these days. Perhaps it is the
fact that this release is from Lurid Entertainment, the people who
brought us Killer Nerd and Bride of Killer Nerd.
Now both these movies were great entertainment, but neither one tried
to make any sort of statement, or be an art piece. They were
merely low-quality, low-budget films made for enjoyment. 
Schlarb,
Ohio is a buttfuck little town inhabited it seems solely by white
trash or nutjobs. Our cast of characters is meant to be freakish,
but never really delivers anyone truly disturbed...with the exception
maybe of Dickie. The Clapper apparently thinks he can
make things happen by clapping his hands, however I'm not sure cause
he only displays this "freakish" behavior once through the
whole film; Pricey is an innocent, child-minded girl who is
mute for no reason (at least that we are told) and has a grandfather
that loves his pet squirrels...until he cooks them for her dinner;
The Licker apparently likes to taste random objects he encounters,
but this also plays no real importance; Crazy Connie who is
quite possibly the most sane of them all; and Dickie who
has a fascination with rooting through garbage cans and an even deeper
fascination with the dead girl he finds inside a dumpster.
There
are however only two real stories to follow here, one is dumpster-diver
Dickie's adventures with his new girlfriend corpse and the other has
something to do with Pricey and the fact that she loves a doll and
when the doll is taken she steals her friends child to replace it
and I wouldn't have known that was what happened had the box not said
it...>gasp< Overall, Townies really leaves you
with a sense of "what just happened here, and why again am I
to care?" Also there are a ton of movies that were filmed
on video that don't really look it; not so here...it looks every inch
of it.