Cover Art

Credits

Director: Ryan Nicholson Starring: Kevan Ohtsji, Taayla Markell, Stephen Chang, Ashley Schappert, Greg Chan, Rob Scattergood, Lee Tichon, Caroline Chojnacki Screenplay: Roy Nicholson, Ryan Nicholson Music: Patrick Coble Tagline: They will all pay the price... Country: USA

Live Feed is about a group of five friends on holiday. The muscle bound, aggro member of the group upsets a local, scenery chewing, crime boss, but is seemingly spared. After the encounter, the friends decide to go to a porno theatre, despite the fact that the group is 3/5 women, and the cinema is showing a very tame porno. Credibility is further strained when two of the group decide to have sex in the scuzzy place, when they could just go on to their presumably cleaner hotel. The theatre belongs to the crime boss, who comes in to watch voyeuristic live feeds of people getting it on then getting parts chopped off. Our five leads are his latest victims and thus begins their struggle to stay alive, though it is a very short struggle for some of them.

I think one of the ideas behind Live Feed was it was going to attempt to surprise people by revealing the film wasn't taking place in Asia, but in a Chinatown. C'est arrivé près de chez vous, indeed. It should be pretty clear early on from all the very North American sounding Asians, this ain't China for real. Another big clue is that all of the outdoor scenes were CLEARLY filmed in Canada. For a while I wasn't sure if it was just low production value with the filmmakers trying to pass Canada off as China, but the film's alternate ending shows the location was supposed to be a twist revelation. Whether it's China or Canada, the film has plot holes if it's happening in either setting, or maybe this is yet another film taking place in bizzarro world.

In true exploitation film fashion, Live Feed sports painful dialogue; bad acting; juvenile social commentary; and xenophobia, the latter made all the worse by the trite philosophical standpoints presented to counter the culture clash. To be fair, the last two were mostly the fault of one character, so perhaps he was just supposed to look like a dick? Anyway, the humour is third rate at best, but occasional unintentional humour does add levity. Continuity can be shoddy, the fight choreography is the worst you'll see this side of an Andreas Schnass movie, and the "twist" is just as shocking as that in Bill Hinzman's Flesheater.

But in Live Feed's defence, it does attempt to build, and I guess build tension, it just unfortunately lacks characters worth giving half a fuck about. The gore takes awhile coming, and isn't always worth the wait. It can look pretty cheap at times, and is almost always too splashy for any sort of realism, almost chambara style. Given the handheld, "snuff movie realism" style camerawork, the FX don't really fit in with the film. Knowing the gist of the story and seeing the way the movie was shot, I expected FX more like what you'd find in the Guinea Pig series, so even when some of the FX were quite good for what they were, they seemed out of context.