![\"Caribbean](\"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/caribbean-basterds-poster.jpg\")
<\/a>Roy (Vik C. Ryan) and Linda (Eleanora Albrecht) are siblings who spend much of the year in the Caribbean, living a life of luxury thanks to their father\u2019s profitable trade as an arms dealer. Roy, however, is beginning to develop ethical qualms and has become disillusioned with working for daddy. Unfortunately he has few transferable skills \u2013 kickboxing, weightlifting and bad hair hardly being prerequisites for most occupations \u2013 and so he decides to start afresh as a pirate, roping in his sister and her boyfriend Jose (Maximiliano Hernando Bruno) for the ride.<\/p>\n
At first they target their father\u2019s dodgy associates, dressing up in white jumpsuits and masks like the droogs from A Clockwork Orange<\/strong> (which I seriously doubt any of these dipsticks would ever have watched), from whom they also steal a predilection for sexual violence and bad jokes. But then they ramp up their activities stealing a huge stash of cocaine from some dangerous looking drug dealers. Unfortunately in doing so they manage to upset the dealer\u2019s boss, the island\u2019s most violent criminal kingpin, who sends out his numerous men to get rid of them at any cost.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, Caribbean Basterds<\/strong> resolutely fails to match up with the previous work of the director. This ain\u2019t no High Crime<\/strong> or The Big Racket<\/strong>, heck it ain\u2019t even up to the standard of The New Barbarians<\/strong> (in which a load of people in daft clothes drove around a quarry in souped up golf buggies). This isn\u2019t, however, really Castellari\u2019s fault and the film has moments in which his skill is evident, most particularly the ornate action sequences which arrive more regularly as the running time progress. It\u2019s not, for sure, as bad as it could have been with another, less talented filmmaker at the helm.<\/p>\n However, even Castellari can\u2019t really do anything with a script this bad. Written by TV specialist Luca Biglione and occasional director Sandro Cecca it has some decent ideas but doesn\u2019t realise them in any way. The first half \u2013 which is essentially a portrait of disaffected youth and features most of the pseudo Clockwork Orange<\/strong> activity \u2013 seems to belong to a different film to the second, more traditionally Castellari-ish half; it is also far less effective, with Castellari seeming uncomfortable with this dialogue heavy, slow moving part of the film.<\/p>\n Another major problem is the sheer vileness of just about every character. Normally Castellari\u2019s films feature a protagonist you can root for, no matter how dubious their motivations or creed (and that\u2019s part of his skill, pulling the audience into supporting characters who commit unsupportable acts). Roy, Linda and Jose are just horrible; spoilt, incestuous brats with a taste for violence that matches their empty heads. I guess you could say they\u2019re akin to the young criminals of Anonymous Avenger<\/strong>, but the whole point was that they were the villains in that film and you couldn\u2019t help but cheer when they were summarily disposed of.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the dialogue; not one word uttered by any of the actors is in any way convincing, although this is not helped at all by the fact that none of the actors can actually act. I\u2019ve written many times before about the absurd habit Italian filmmakers seem to have developed for shooting in English – despite it not being their native language – rather than relying on dubbers or subtitles. It\u2019s no wonder actors have problems when they don\u2019t really understand what they\u2019re saying and are unfamiliar with the words coming out of their mouths. But in this case some of the actors are English speakers, and they\u2019re just as bad as everyone else. Vik C. Ryan never seems to have been in anything much else; maybe he was chosen for his athletic prowess, which wouldn\u2019t be unusual for Castellari who helped make stars out of former stuntmen such as Giancarlo Prete and Massimo Vanni. Unfortunately he\u2019s just a dreadful, and Eleanora Albrecht and Maximiliano Hernando Bruno aren\u2019t much better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the more curious side effects of the publicity surrounding the release of Inglourious Basterds in 2009 was the return to action of Enzo Castellari, the director of the 1978 film upon which it was based (the correctly spelled Inglorious Bastards)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4150,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1212],"tags":[743,1240],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4146"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4146"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4151,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4146\/revisions\/4151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>