Release Date: TBD
Director: Mark Lewis
MPAA Rating: NR
Film Pulse Score: .5/10
Wild Girl Waltz is an ultra-indie feature film from writer/director Mark Lewis that aims to recapture the simplicity and intelligence of a 90s indie comedy like Clerks or Slacker. It does this by sticking with three main characters who have a series of pointless conversations through the course of one uneventful day. While the film may have had the best of intentions, it didn’t work an any level.
The basic premise is that two friends, Angie and Tara, played by Christina Shipp and Samantha Steinmetz respectively, decide to take some sort of drug and it’s up to Tara’s boyfriend Brian (Jared Stern) to babysit them till they sober up.
The film starts with an insanely long and unnecessary opening credit sequence which plays an entire 4-minute country song and features a lot of driving around shots. This feels entirely too heavy-handed considering the cast is so small and the crew amounts to only a handful of people. This is something that will go on to plague the film throughout its 82 minute runtime. There is so much padding and filler that it quickly becomes frustrating. There’s a random scene with a guy chopping wood for nearly a minute straight, though this guy proves to be the best actor in the film.
All the performances felt forced and unnatural, almost as if the actors were on a stage rather than in front of a camera. This was particularly noticeable because the script was attempting to have natural sounding conversations between the characters. The interactions were clearly drawing influence from Clerks, title cards and all, but everything they talked about felt so pointless and irrelevant, it quickly grew tiresome.
Being an ultra-indie flick, this had your typical home movie quality to it. While it generally looked terrible, the visual quality wasn’t the worst aspect of the film, so the attention was drawn away from the look and the focus was pulled towards the other problems that riddle this mess.
While the film was nearly entirely, unintentionally, humorless, there is one scene that proves to be particularly funny. There’s a random scene at a park pavilion where the three main characters are eating lunch. As they return to their truck they find a heavy-set woman attempting to steal from them. The woman gets Tara and Angie in a headlock for some reason, then Brian appears and immediately and without hesitation punches her in the face.
Wild Girl Waltz is an uninspired film that fails on nearly every level. While it’s above something like The Room and it doesn’t have any aspirations to be bigger than it is, it’s still not worth watching. It’s a solid attempt, but ultimately it comes up short in every aspect and most would be wise to avoid.
