My DVD/Stream of the Weeks is a fine first feature with a GREAT title for a contemporary noir thriller: Bad Turn Worse. It’s set in a nowheresville Texas cotton gin town. Three childhood friends have just graduated from high school, and two are looking to escape to college – Bobby (Jeremy Allen White) and Sue (MacKenzie Davis). Not sharing a speck of Bobby’s and Sue’s intellectual curiosity, Sue’s longtime boyfriend B.J. (Logan Huffman) doesn’t want them to go; B.J. is dreamy and testosterone-filled, but bone-headed and weak-willed, with a gift for making impulsive, destructive choices. Bobby is sweet on Sue, and she is starting to be repelled by B.J.’s immaturity and selfishness. Sure enough, B.J. does something which entangles them all in a lethal jam.
Pretty soon there’s a double cross within a double cross, with a love triangle overlay. Nobody can trust anybody else, and somebody is gonna have to die…
The young leads are good, but two veteran TV actors sparkle in supporting turns. Mark Pellegrino plays a ruthless and crazy-scary villain that no one should cross. Jon Gries (Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite) is hilariously deadpan as the corrupt Sheriff who tries to connect the dots for Bobby with metaphors – and Bobby’s dots just aren’t connecting.
Bad Turn Worse’s noir sensibility comes from 1) the amoral attitude that sometimes you gotta break the law and 2) the expectation that there can’t be a happy ending with all this treachery in play.
Bad Turn Worse is written by Dutch Southern and is the directorial debut of Simon and Zeke Hawkins. These guys have definitely proven that they can pull off a solid thriller. Bad Turn Worse is available streaming from Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.