Driftwood
(2006/Image Entertainment)
Picture:
C Sound: C+ Extras: D Feature: D
How about
a drama about abuse in a boot camp school?
Tim Sullivan’s Driftwood
(2006) is a very bad, odd, even campy horror tale about a young man abused in
the title location, designed to “help” young men with problems. Bad at any time, the recent deaths of actual
attendees show further how lame, exploitive, possibly gay baiting (intended or
not) and outright idiotic this mess is.
When
David (Raviv Ullman) is forced to enter the camp and seems confused as to why,
he is abused on arrival, supposedly haunted by a previous “attendee” who seems
to have been killed and is tormented by everyone. Adding to the clichés is real life wrestler
Diamond Dallas Page, playing the bad guy.
And from there, it just gets worse and worse and worse. It makes the Stallone film Lock Up look smart. Avoid at all costs.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is poor, from some kind of lame digital
source, has digititis and is just not easy to watch. The sound is here is DTS 5.1 and Dolby
Digital 5.1 mixes, both of which are harsh, shrill, too loud at times (beware
your volume knob) and overall dreadful.
The Dolby 2.0 mix tries to add Pro Logic surrounds, but the sound is
just badly recorded and processed for the very worse. Alternate ending, deleted/extended scenes, a
few audio commentaries, still and a making of featurette are the boring extras.
- Nicholas Sheffo
