Straight-to-DVD: Dave Rodriguez's AMERICAN BULLY embarrasses badly

American Bully? More like a psychotic asshole who needs to be incarcerated forth-with. The original title of this shock-ingly unnecessary movie was Anytown (click on the link for the original poster), which should pretty much alert you to the subtlety-level on display through-out. (You mean, it could happen here? Sure could, kids!) Still, the movie is timely. Just this weekend, the new Mr. Norway snuffed out around 100 lives on the basis of some loony-tune political non-thinking. In his "new" film (made two years ago), director/co-writer (with Zak Meyers) Dave Rodriguez, pictured below, pulls out all the stops regarding bullying, immigration, terrorism, 9/11, the "Muslim menace" and America the ugly, and in the process creates so much noise and nonsense that you'll soon cry uncle.

Yes, bullying in high school can certainly lead to some nasty stuff, both at the time and later on, and you might even take our lead character (played with pretty much a single grim expression by Matt O'Leary, below) as a metaphor for the "red" half of our country. But so what? You'd still have to come up with a story that contained more than one thud-dingly obvious cliche after another in order to keep your audi-ence half-satisfied.

Here, the set-up is all bully, all the time, and Mr. O'Leary is as yet nowhere near an interesting, versatile or charaismatic enough actor to carry off a role like this. Consequently, his three friends (below) and the two girls who go off for a fuck-fest/trash-talk-the-immigrants afternoon are so poorly conceived that no real people can be developed. Lines of dialog are dropped into their mouths with little regard for consistency or character.

What we get for the first half of the movie is the usual boys behaving (very) badly scenario, followed by a second half that hands us kidnapping, murder, suicide, betrayal, the works. Except that, since we haven't remotely believed what's come before (except as a primer of cliche's seen in earlier, better films), putting us through the horror of what follows is like a near-constant slap in the kisser.

Technically, and construction-wise, the movie is a wasteland, too. The opening scene, involving an uncredited John Savage and a couple of sleek, lawyer-looking broads, seems inserted only to let us immediately know that something horrible has happened so we'll hang on through the slop that follows. Night scenes are so dark as to be a complete mystery, through which we have only some bad dialog to guide us. And the deserted house (below)? Is there a building in the movies of late that has called more attention to itself?

I cannot claim to fathom the motives of the people who made this movie, perhaps with what might be called the best of intentions. I can say, however, that what they've ended up giving us is a "kill-the-immigrants" movie that will most appeal to folk who want to do exactly that and who will happily watch and shout, "Right on!  But we're a lot smarter that these bozos, so we'll get away with it."

From Green Apple Entertainment, American Bully makes its straight-to-DVD debut this Tuesday, July 26 -- for sale or rental.