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Perhaps the debut entry in the Swedish-Musical-Cop-Comedy/Thriller genre, Sound of Noise was enjoyed at Cardiff’s SoundTrack Film Festival by as many as five people, as bad traffic and an even worse game of Rugby saw the majority of the city’s population elsewhere last Friday. And it’s a damn shame for them that they missed this little indie gem.

Sound of Noise concerns itself with harried detective Amadeus Warnerbring (Bengt Nilsson) a man who despite growing up in a family of musical genii, is tone deaf. Clearly troubled by his parents’ disappointment over his lack of musicality, and his brother’s success as a master conductor, Warnerbring chose to join the police. Unfortunately for him, there are some musical criminals on the loose.

Heading up this group are Sanna and Magnus (Sanna Persson and Magnus Börjeson), who have recruited a motley crew of percussionists to take on Magnus’ opus – ‘Music for One City and Six Drummers. Broken into four movements, this composition is an elaborate work of auditory art that uses everyday objects and sounds throughout the city as instruments. In order to complete their concert, these six drummers aren’t afraid to break the law.

Points for originality then. The duo behind the film, Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, are following up on their 2001 short Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers on a grander scale, with the musical miscreants using everything from JCB’s to hospital equipment (and a patient) to make their music. These scenes are by far the most memorable – expertly crafted to seem both ludicrous and somehow credible at the same time. When the gang hold up a bank, they use ink stamps as percussion and shred hundreds of Krona notes to create chords, even building the screams of a bank clerk into the melody as he watches the money destroyed in front of him.

Nilsson, as the troubled cop, is engaging even though he’s left with the far less fun job of chasing after the musicians, picking up discarded metronomes as clues along the way. The film begins to struggle a bit towards the finale, and unfortunately the last movement of the score is perhaps the least interesting, as the gang clamber up electrical pylons and use the cables as instrument strings. Despite it’s scale, this effort doesn’t quite live up to the first three musical sections. The combination of this and Warnerbring’s attempts to rid himself of music once and for all derail things somewhat as the film closes, but the ride there is worth the price of admission.

In 2007, two titans of modern cinema revived the Grindhouse genre of American drive in movie theatres and unleashed a double header of sleazy, trashy filth to cinemagoers. While Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and (to a better extent) Planet Terror, from Robert Rodriguez, delivered a faithful homage to the video nasties of yesteryear, they maintained a cinematic style and gloss that just didn’t exist within true Grindhouse classics. Fortunately for those who favour the unapologetic shittiness of the genre, they do still exist, and Dear God No has spades upon spades of shittiness…but is that a good thing?

The film follows a group of murderous rampaging bearded bikers as they invade the family home of a disgraced Doctor only to find something sinister locked in his basement and an unspeakable beast in the surrounding woods. Simple? You bet your ass it’s simple, but the story isn’t the main facet of Dear God No, it’s the often-disgraceful depths writer/director James Bickert plunders to portray just how disgusting and low-life these bikers are. Before the film was shown to the colourful crowd that filled the screening I was in, Bickert himself delivered a recorded message and offered no apologies for what we were about to see. All he wanted was hollering, jeers and beers. He knows he’s not trying to make audience friendly movies you watch on a date with a Mormon; he thrives on the reactions of disgust and, as such, his latest effort demands to be enjoyed merely as a fun and grotesque crack at American Grindhouse cinema, and nothing more.

Make no bones about it, as a competent piece of filmmaking it’s awful, really really awful, yet somehow it manages to be hugely entertaining despite it’s glaring and frequent flaws.  Everything you would normally judge a film is just bad. The acting, shot selection, sound and editing is honestly some of the worst I’ve ever seen in a feature. The bad performances might be acceptable, and even expected, but awkward framing and overly noticeable audio cuts litter the film throughout. And while shoddy filmmaking is a staple of the Grindhouse movement, Bickert takes liberties with the quality of the final film and it just becomes lazy rather than quirky. The make up and effects are often great though and very much in line with an 80s video nasty. Heads come off, intestines become exposed and that’s just the mild stuff. Bickert isn’t afraid to go to some dark places, and a large part of Dear God No is in a pitch-black abyss of bad taste. If you’re easily offended then do not even entertain the idea of watching this film, but if, however, you find the humour and charm in the Grindhouse, then there’s a lot to like here. I often found myself laughing at just how ridiculous it got, but then that’s the whole point isn’t it?

It’s difficult to say whether Dear God No is a good film or not; it’s poorly made, poorly acted and completely ridiculous…but then that’s what Tarantino and Rodriguez honoured with their love letters to the genre. Dear God No is funny for the right reasons and entertaining in its preposterousness, but despite this, Bickert does threaten to overstep the limits of taste on a couple of occasions. That might be his goal, I don’t really know, but when 15 minutes of an 81 minute film is a topless dancer with a Richard Nixon mask on, you can be fairly certain he ran out of worthwhile ideas quite quickly.

Dear God No is released on DVD on the 14th of January 

By Eva.

Bobcat Goldthwait, an American comedian, who has released many funny stand-up comedy DVDs and was working for Jimmy Kimmel Live, has now done a film that each and every one of us has dreamed about doing at least once in our lifetime.  Owning a sportscar that you can drive anywhere with, and shooting everyone who gets on your way and pisses you off.

Joel Murray plays Frank, a depressed man in his forties, who spends his days watching the horrible TV programmes and listening to his loud neighbours. When he finds out he is terminally ill, he decides to teach the TV stars he is repulsed by a final lesson. He takes his gun, steals a sportscar and gets on the road to get rid off of some of the most ungrateful, ignorant, consuming people of our society.  On his way he meets a 16-year old Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr) who is excited that somebody finally shares her view of life and is desperate to join him. Together, they will become the 21 century’s Bonny and Clyde – a dangerous  pair travelling around the highways of America, showing no mercy to anyone gets on their way.

The casting has been done brilliantly, you can really see the exhaustion and desperation in Joel Murrays face as he is speaking of everything that he considers wrong in this society. Tara Lynne Barr on the other hand gives out the youthful energy and craziness that would otherwise lack in the film.

I wouldn’t say it is the best movie ever made – it doesn’t exactly offer anything new and the twists in the movie are actually quite predictable, but I think that the feeling surrounding the movie is very strong and makes you not even hope for anything big. Watching another pampered idiot that everybody has met at least once in their life being killed in a movie is fun and satisfying enough. The exhaustion, hopelessness, numb indifference feeling is created fully by Joel Murray and he is damn good at delivering it.

Everyone who has ever felt that all the reality and talent TV programmes  like  „ X-Factor“ , „Jersey Shore“  etc  are horrible and have nothing to do with real life or true talent – „ God bless America“ is the movie for you. Anyone who is sick of all the beauty queens and the world’s unwritten rules of how is the best way to be – make sure you check out this film. The movie is a great fun to watch if you don’t mind a little blood and if you are looking for more than just a beautiful face in a movie.

Also, the soundtrack is worth giving another listen as well.