AmericanFetish

American Fetish (2009)

I like going into some movies as blind as possible. Some of my favorite movie watching experiences have been when I have little to no preconceived notion of what a film would be about. American Fetish sort of falls into that category.

In the film reviewing business, we sometimes get what we call ‘screeners.’ These can be a full fledged release copy of a film, with box art, professionally printed inserts and disc labels, all the way down to a cheap dvd-r with a title scrawled in illegible black Sharpie. In this case, American Fetish came to me as a dvd-r with a computer printed label telling me the title, director (Michael Simmons), and the genre (mystery).

Having said that, here’s a little tip for all you aspiring filmmakers out there: Watermarks are cool, they’re useful and there’s no harm in using them. Unless you’re going to put them obtrusively in the middle of the screen. In solid white letters. For the entire duration of the film. Then I hate you a little bit for that. Because I have to review it. I know, I know, most everyone who will watch this won’t have my issue with it, but I had to say it because it was part of MY movie watching experience.

American Fetish is a film noir sex mystery about our protagonist Chet and his quest to clear his dead father’s name of murder. See, Chet’s dad used to shoot blue (porn) movies with his 8mm camera, and supposedly one of them has the key to the murder on it! Chet also owns a fetish strip club that looks like it could be the place that the Suicide Girls train at before moving up to the big leagues. Basically, there’s a lot of 50s stylized nudity.

Visually, the movie has it’s ups and downs. At times, you can tell a lot of thought went into the shot composition, lighting, etc. and at others it looks like your typical low budget b-movie junk. But it’s more interesting than crap, because it appears the plot was threaded around the fetish film scenes because it’d be really hard to market a movie of vignettes lacking a story. And there are a lot of those scenes.

The acting isn’t much to write home about, but I blame most of that on the character of Chet. Most of the exposition is delivered through voice over narration by our hero, and while it’s obvious the story called for him to have the cold detachment of a hard-boiled detective, it comes off as a man with average reading comprehension skills. I can forgive this though because it does work, in a roundabout way, and the visuals distract from it somewhat. Everyone else does an adequate to above average job with his or her roles, but no one really stands out. I also don’t feel anyone was pushed outside of their comfort zone with any of these parts, but I give the film credit for playing to its strengths in that regard.

What did blow me away though, was the music. Rarely does a film’s score impress the hell out of me, but this one did. The simple jazz tunes that simmered under the scenes really added to the atmosphere and vibe of the movie, and if it weren’t there, it wouldn’t have worked at all. If a soundtrack album existed, I’d buy it.

In a nutshell, if Raymond Chandler got into a time machine and came to our era, got really drunk, watched Striptease, then wrote a version of the screenplay without Burt Reynolds smeared in Vaseline, took out all the rest of the crappy parts except for the strip club, looked at a bunch of Betty Page pin-ups the whole time, then handed the whole thing to the production team that does the Unsolved Mysteries re-enactments, you’d have American Fetish. With a pretty kick-ass soundtrack.

2 ½ out of 4

reviewed by Seth Moore