Great Ass.
Ryli Morgan Collection (2006)
R0 / NTSC DVD
On Mark Productions / 2006
Director: Mark Baranowski
Writer: Mark Baranowski
Cast: Ryli Morgan, Mark Baranowski, Brinke Stevens
Review by Ted Phipps
This independent offering contains three short movies starring actress Ryli Morgan that have been remastered and rescored, along with a few extras.
Despair (2001) – 25 minutes. The first piece tells the story of the last moments of life for each of the two main characters. A husband commits suicide, but most of the screen time is spent with the wife, showing her reaction and almost ritualistic preparations to end her own life. The telling of the story is disjointed, moving forwards and backwards in time as the plot unfolds, but it’s easy to keep up with what’s happening thanks to some rather good editing. The despairing atmosphere and feeling is extraordinary.
Runaway Terror (2002) – 60 minutes. A whodunit with a twist on a twist, sort of an indie Giallo. A cop teams up with the twin sister of a murder victim, and together they try to discover who the murderer is. This was the weakest of the three stories, both in technical quality and in the quantity of reality-free moments.
Expendable (2003) – 49 minutes. In the third movie, a drug dealing husband walked out on his wife a year ago. He shows up at the house one day, ready to leave the country after making a last big score, and wants to take his wife with him… and his new girlfriend (played by scream queen Brinke Stevens). What he doesn’t know is that his wife isn’t the same girl he left, thanks to her new lover, Monica. He discovers too late that he’d have been better off letting sleeping dogs lie. This one is closest to a classic horror story, and despite some obvious padded scenes included only to stretch the running time, is my favorite on the disk.
The three short movies are interesting, and I’m sure the technical execution will improve with experience and larger budgets. Baranowski has a talent for dialog, but in these early works he’s still working out the bugs of audio recording, camerawork and story pacing.
Ryli Morgan is a beautiful woman and the camera loves her (as they say). Her screen test clips consist mainly of slow strip teases in various settings and various outfits. I have no idea if this is available for rental anywhere, so it’s going to be a blind buy situation, and you’ll have to judge for yourself if it’s worth risking your hard-earned bucks. For the price, you get a lot of content. Personally, I don’t feel like I was ripped off by buying this DVD, and sometimes that’s the best measure of an independent release.
