Director- Ted V. Mikels

Oh Ted, poor, poor Ted, what has happened to this once mighty paradigm of garbage. This so called “film” explores new depths of horrendousness, even for Ted Mikels. A horrible intro voiceover written by Ted is meant to place the film in the middle of a military coup in a “South Africa” type country where the black majority has just taken rule out of the hands of the racist white few. Ted plays a plantation owner, or whatever they’re called in SA, and all the servants of the house subdue him and put him through a kangaroo court of sorts. What follows can only be described as agonizing, long-winded unwieldy philosophizing and arguing between the poorly dubbed and poorerly shot trial sequences and participants. Ted is intermittently beaten and kicked to liven up the “action”. Horrible, shudder inducing montages of “traditional” dancing (clearly filmed on a nearby college campus during dance class) animals and rain give us a sense of place.

Cry the beloved country my ass. There is no acting here, the characters, that is the black women, are present by default only, and recite and ad-lib stilting hollow and stiff lines. The whole thing for that matter is grating and painful and I feel tense, like I’ve been sitting in a dentist’s waiting room for hours. It all just keeps going on and on and on until the “jury” finds him guilty and stomps Ted to death with their high-heels.

By this point in his career as a whole, and this film specifically, it has become abundantly clear that Ted has a serious S&M/stomping fantasy, and this whole film is a protracted excuse to get wood and get off to some black women. If you get wood seeing Ted V. Mikels cinematically shoot himself in the foot repeatedly, then this is definitely a continuation of that theme. Although I can’t shake a sinking feeling of pity, and I somehow feel that somewhere Ted is furiously twisting his moustache and cursing a world that never understood him.

email Seth