Stressed-out and unhinged Vietnam veteran George Rossi (excellently played with manic intensity and vitality by Demetri Kallas) works as the superintendent of a crumbling apartment building in Queens, New York City. Mounting pressure both at work and at home cause George to go murderously off the deep end. Writer/directors Evan Makrogiannis and Brian Weaver do a masterful job of vividly evoking the fiercely harsh, gritty, and unapologetically in-your-face shocking and upsetting aesthetic of vintage 70's era grindhouse fare: Besides the expected handy helping of explicit female nudity, raunchy soft-core sex, and, of course, plentiful outbursts of unsparingly savage, ugly, and gruesome violence, we also get a nonstop cavalcade of hardcore twisted perversion that includes voyeurism, foot fetishism, masturbation, S&M torture, snuff movies, incest, rape, and even necrophilia. Moreover, this movie deserves extra praise for firmly grounding the bleak premise in a certain grimly plausible everyday blue collar reality; we see George making his thankless daily rounds and coping with the colorful array of oddball tenants. It's also well acted by a capable cast, with stand-out contributions by Lynn Lowry as George's long-suffering disabled wife Maureen, Manoush as lethal and abrasive Russian prostitute Olga, Ron Braunstein as evil corrupt cop Detective Sardusky, Edgar Moye as the easygoing Andre, Ruby Larocca as Edgar's sweet fiancé Karen, Raine Brown as an ill-fated hooker, and, in a truly hilarious turn, Brandon Slaggle as flamboyant cross-dressing homosexual Franny the Tranny. Better still, there's a wickedly funny sense of pitch-black humor -- George's freak-out scenes are genuinely funny in an admittedly sick sort of way -- as well as a valid point about how crazed folks like George and Olga are dangerously toxic products of horrible circumstances beyond their control and a strong use of the Big Apple urban setting. Stephen Kilcullen's purposefully rough'n'grainy cinematography gives the picture an appropriately grungy look. Kevin McSweeney's rattling score likewise does the moody trick. Essential viewing for devout fans of raw'n'nasty indie sleaze cinema.
Review of The Super
