Red Cockroaches Movie Review:


At some unspecified time in the future, Adam Zuraski is wandering around the city he lives in, New York. He’s just broken up with his girlfriend (whose parents loved him and scared him), and she refuses to leave him alone.
It’s a foreboding place, this city, where acid rain falls from the sky, threatening to melt the rooftops, and there is talk of mutant creatures lurking in the shadows, (we never see them though).
Whilst waiting for his train to arrive, he finds himself involved in a staring contest with a girl there. She gets on the train, and he sees she’s dropped something. A tooth?
He picks it up, and takes it home with him. Again, the girl is there in the graveyard when he goes to mourn his father and sister who died some years ago, she even comes to view his flat.
Not long after this, he visits his mum. She’s acting a bit odd. His sister has appeared, back from the dead and standing there in the garden. But it’s the same girl!
Argh!
This is one weird-ass movie.
Apparently it cost less than two thousand dollars to make this movie (beating the pants off the impressive record of “Primer”, at seven thousand.), but for the most part it looks like it cost very little to produce. “It was shot on a digital camcorder, and edited on a Mac” the story goes.
Therefore, the picture quality is a bit squiffy, and the sound is hissy in places. But they know this, and have tried to compensate for it in other areas, with some measure of success.
The allusions to acid rain actually help, because they sort of justify everything being very yellow and misty.
In fairness, there is some real raw talent in the making here. The direction is pretty cool for the most part, with some novel flourishes - economically using photo-montages on colour backgrounds to create flashbacks (cheaper and easier to work with than child actors, but just as effective) and some canny fading of one prop into another between scenes.

This is an early show-case for Miguel Coyula, who wrote, directed, produced, edited, the works - he could easily go on to bigger and better things if he plays his cards right.

Amazingly, the acting passable too, but what is really, wildly bonkers is the story. It is uber-weird. There are a lot of things that trouble the mind post - viewing, things that you try to work out, mostly involving a cat, a DNA lab, a coma and that freaking tooth.

This is the main reason why, despite the unavoidable cheapness of production values, and inherent ickyness of a storyline that centres on graphic incest, this somehow worms its way into the brain and sticks around. It is by no means a likeable film, but it is certainly not forgettable.

Terresa Gaffney

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