Red Devil is a 2019 crime/drama that intertwines tales of sex, drugs, rock and woe.
Oscar Knight (Jack Turner) and his beautiful bride Ella (Fernanda Diniz) are a happy couple, though Oscar is distressed about his brother William (Josh Burdett), who has sunk into a pit of drug abuse from a highly addicting menace called Red Devil. There’s also his mother Elizabeth (Linda Marlowe), an old, canterkous, foul-mouthed bigot who doesn’t much care for the girl. Or anyone. So how do Oscar and Ella deal with the stress? Easy. When they’re not in church praying for William’s safe return, they head out into the night and murder sinners; mostly drug dealers. Meanwhile, the streets are full of users, including a desperate addict named Dreamer (Adam Deacon), who kills for his hits, and a socially inept dope maker (Ian Reddington) who’s taken a little too much of his own product.
From writer and director Savvas D. Michael, Red Devil is a small independent film that, like so many in the genre, is heavily, heavily, influenced by the films of Quentin Tarantino, though not many aren’t these days. However, Michael seems to have a special affinity for them, his sophomore film practically begging for fans of Tarantino to call foul. Red Devil is a dark comedy with outlandish characters speaking in lengthy prophetic prose, shooting guns and dealing death. That might sound like any number of movies crowding digital shelves, but with its mix of off beat underground trumpet-strong rock hits of the 60s and 70s intermixed with popular opera arias and you can see the homaging a mile away.
Still, Michael is no slouch. I greatly enjoyed his first film, a fun, wonderfully energetic little film called Smoking Guns, and so was really excited to see what he’d come up with next. Red Devil is not exactly what I expected, the film a little less inventive and inspired or funny as Smoking Guns but not without some genuine merit. Oscar and Ella are an interesting pair, she becoming pregnant and insatiable both for sex and blood, looking for any excuse to either pull the trigger or goad her husband to. I mean, she has Oscar do her doggystyle while he guns down a couple of sleazeball dealers. That’s new.
Either way, perhaps limited by his budget, Michael can’t quite get the scope he’s probably after but more than makes up for it with his actors, something he seems most adept at doing. Diniz is alluring and dangerous while Reddington and his there-or-not-there companion Matt Lapinskas are just weird while Deacon runs away with the whole show, his frantic disintegrating Dreamer almost on a different level. These are people maybe not all that fleshed out but have hooks aplenty in keeping eyes on the screen.
Sure, very little of it is convincing, but nor is it meant to be, the film a dark fantasy with dips and dives, peaks and valleys. Michael laps on a heady mix of styles but doesn’t go overboard, despite a few moments where he very nearly teeters on the edge. You also get a sense early on where it’s going – where it must – yet it doesn’t let you down getting there. Recommended.