Lost Angelas (2019)

This one’s a real mystery. Not the movie, mind you. The fact that it was “Film Threat’s 2020 ‘Award This’ Winner for Best Indie made for under $100k & Best Director.”  After watching, I’m left only to surmise that whoever dolled out the awards at Film Threat for 2020 was doing so in an impaired state, and/or that movies made for less than $100k must all be terrible, and thus we should probably stop making them.  There’s actually a seed of a really good story here, but it fails to come to life amid bad acting, poor dialog, a huge void of character and story development, and (award winning) directing that is amateurish and frequently gets in the way of the narrative. The various “twist” attempts to make this a thriller fail as well, either because they gave it away several scenes prior with a set-up line that was entirely out of place in the given scene, or because the character development is so weak,  the twist isn’t a twist at all, just brand new information. I really don’t like to single out individuals for criticism, but the worst offender in terms of bad acting was the lead, who I only leaned afterwards is also the Writer, Director, Editor, and Producer. I suppose some form of kudos are in order for raising something shy of $100k and getting your movie idea made into your movie, your way, starring you…  and especially for doing whatever you did on the Indie contest and festival circuit to get someone to give you any kind of award for it.. as well of course for getting it on Amazon Prime.  And I suppose there’s a lesson that some movie critics and outlets can become far too enamored with movies that are about the movie industry.  Unfortunately, the reality here is that a good movie idea was dragged down by a clearly not-so good idea of someone thinking they could do it all  and do it well… leaving all of us with a movie that’s simply not good.