Imagine the attempted killing scene of the Tony Shaloub character in Pain & Gain stretched out to a full feature length film & you get Stuck. Based on a heinous true crime incident, this is a surprisingly funny & nasty black comedy thriller that often feels in tone like an exploitation flick as filtered through the lens of the Coen brothers.
We get some extremely unsavory characters who find themselves in exceedingly precarious situations. What makes the film feel fresh & unique is that it starts off as a gruesome thriller & it looks to be headed in that direction until it starts to add some increasingly bizarre & deliciously dark humor that really make the turn of events that much more amusing & shocking to bear witness to. Mena Suvari & Stephen Rea are brilliant in their respective roles especially Suvari who seems to be having a lot of fun in the role of the manipulative & selfish Brandi. Gordon's direction is similarly interesting & his choices are quite memorable. A hip hop song set to the images of an old age home, a really funny & awkward sex scene, a dog biting into an injured man's wounds & the funniest scene that involves a character mentioning of a deer crawling after getting accidentally hit which had me in splits. All of this is then topped off by a crazy climax set entirely inside a claustrophobic garage that perfectly conveys a sense of karmic retribution & effective social commentary about the plight of homeless people & society's apathy towards them.
This & Edmond just prove that Stuart Gordon(RIP) was an extremely versatile director whose films were much more than Lovecraft & Poe adaptations. Wish he had made more such films in his career.
We get some extremely unsavory characters who find themselves in exceedingly precarious situations. What makes the film feel fresh & unique is that it starts off as a gruesome thriller & it looks to be headed in that direction until it starts to add some increasingly bizarre & deliciously dark humor that really make the turn of events that much more amusing & shocking to bear witness to. Mena Suvari & Stephen Rea are brilliant in their respective roles especially Suvari who seems to be having a lot of fun in the role of the manipulative & selfish Brandi. Gordon's direction is similarly interesting & his choices are quite memorable. A hip hop song set to the images of an old age home, a really funny & awkward sex scene, a dog biting into an injured man's wounds & the funniest scene that involves a character mentioning of a deer crawling after getting accidentally hit which had me in splits. All of this is then topped off by a crazy climax set entirely inside a claustrophobic garage that perfectly conveys a sense of karmic retribution & effective social commentary about the plight of homeless people & society's apathy towards them.
This & Edmond just prove that Stuart Gordon(RIP) was an extremely versatile director whose films were much more than Lovecraft & Poe adaptations. Wish he had made more such films in his career.