Don't you just love these bogus glowing reviews that the film's cast and crew write and then commission other people to also write on here? "Hey, rate it even an 8 or a 9 so it doesn't look TOO obvious that we padded the rating ourselves. But no lower than that!" The film is a boring, molasses-paced mess and the storyline is just laughable (and that's being nice!). The lead actor with the fake greasy mustache is also a talentless schmuck who obviously just got cherry-picked by his own friend to star in this. Films where a group of friends or bed buddies all get together to make are fine, just acknowledge that sometimes there's very little talent among your little cult. And for God's sake, don't come on here writing glaringly obvious fabricated reviews glorifying yourselves!

A middle-aged hired gun named Print (Aaron Stielstra) is obsessed with having style and poetry to his assassinations. He has been working with loyalty for his boss, Mr. Paul (Montgomery Ford), for years. But his latest assignment - the killing of a brothel owner (Dan van Husen) who mandates cruel abortions on his whores - presents two challenges. He must train a young understudy during the assignment, and he's been told to pull off the killing "quick and dirty" -- which may not leave time for Print's usual, obsessively imaginative methods.OK firstly, the only reviews for this movie are stellar. Guess what that means? They are written by shills who worked on the film.This move is absolutely horrible. Laboriously directed and no acting and poor writing. The hookers are hideous.Stay away.

The Scarlet Worm: Finally! Wild Dogs in mass-release! Longtime fans had a lot to get salivating over: Fredianelli free from starring and cinematography and able to focus on directing, Lambert writing (after his wildly successful two previous outings with Fredianelli), Stielstra starring, special guest stars, and a solid, sordid grindhouse set-up. Everything was in the right place, but with all of these elements, the final product ends up feeling a bit too restrained, a bit too tame to live up to its premise and the promise of all involved. If the earlier Fredianelli efforts sometimes felt a bit slapped-together or a bit rough around the edges, this effort feels a bit too pretty and concerned with professionalism (a gambit that seems to have paid off in some ways). A perfect point of comparison is A Habitation of Devils, Lambert's previous collaboration with Fredianelli. That movie is super rough around the edges, with a script that barely manages to bounce between generic stereotypes and digital video cinematography sometimes so underlit to the point of indiscernibility. However, it manages these hiccups due to a sense of what, for lack of better terms, I'll call "going for it." This same "going for it" mentality is all over other WD pics like The Minstrel Killer and even the recent Apocrypha. Why then does even Stielstra, normally a maniac when facing the camera, play it so cool? Why can't the genre kings (Fredianelli and Lambert) deliver on some of their promises? Why does Print have a reputation for being such a dirty bastard and such a merciless killer but never show us why? Why can't we see what makes his work such poetry to him (as he says over and over and over again)? Even the flick's abortion subtext feels pretty inoffensive and tame (unexpected, consider the distributor Unearthed Films, generally known for stuff like the Guinea Pig and Slaughtered Vomit Dolls). Money was well-placed to grab Dan van Husen, who provides most of the flick's best scenes, but even his work and the (as- expected) excellent shoot-outs feel bogged down by a laborious execution of the basic genre steps. There is a nice father-son dynamic between van Husen and Stielstra, but even that seems to too frequently be displaced in favor of other beats and concerns. I wanted to love this one so much, but in the end, I just can't find as much to love about it as in the cast and crew's other various projects.

Director Michael Fredianelli's western shows a lot of guts to present characters this unlikable, yet still insists you empathize with their ickiness. Of course, none of this would be achieved with B-movie actors, and, luckily, the principle cast here is exceptional. One look at the plot, involving an unstable gunfighter who trains a young killer to rid a town of its delusional brothel-owner, dismisses any idea that the subject matter is going to be modest, and the actors evoke the kind of natural weariness and cold-blooded fury often "corrected" in more conventionally moral westerns. Most of the graphic, stylized content here comes in the form of gargantuan, spurting gunshot wounds and a lot of buck-naked prostitutes. Screenwriter David Lambert allows his often sociopathic characters to speak in dialogue both realistic and humorous, and with leads like Aaron Stielstra (as the shootist Print) spaghetti western veteran Dan van Husen, and the commanding presence of Montgomery Ford on screen, there's more than enough brooding on screen to sustain both sarcasm and menace for the film's 90 minutes. The vivid cinematography gives a blighted look to the many seedy locales, this despite a low budget. $25,000? A western made for that today in Hollywood could barely improve on an interiors-only moral fable like Randall Heller's "Tolerance". Again, the film-makers overcome most production obstacles, though in a few places the pacing is draggy. But considering the plot deals with a talkative villain (van Husen) who co-stars alongside so many other talkative villains (Print even has his own deranged voice-over), the action-packed gunfights and ass-kickings make up for it. Solid soundtrack by Stielstra features traditional folk music as well as demented instrumentation, both creating the proper ambiguity and dread which support the movie's ending. Film also features great cameos by a jellyfish and a giant sow.