Rottentail (2018)


Director Brian Skiba is from my neck of the woods or, more appropriately, desert.  I got to looking him up when his fictional town of Easter Falls was shown as being about 40 miles from Lake Pleasant and 125 miles from Payson.  Since I don't know exactly which direction from those towns it is,  I would put it somewhere in Yavapai County, north of Wickenburg, but not too far.  Probably up around an isolated youth counseling center that I used to deliver to when I worked with a pharmacy 25 years ago or so.  

The reason I would be thinking all of this, and getting distracted enough to try and figure out where a town that doesn't even exist would be is that trying to figure out where the town is seemed more interesting than the movie.  As much as I love supporting anyone creative coming from Phoenix and the surrounding areas, Skiba is a filmmaker more along the lines of Jess Franco or Jean Rolin.  He just hasn't done anything truly brilliant yet.  He keeps churning out low-budget features, mainly horror comedies and westerns, but the closest he has come accidentally making something memorable is Rottentail. 

Peter Cotten (Corin Nemec) is a scientist researching a fertility drug.  He loves rabbits, with his biggest trauma being the death of his pet bunny at the hands of a bully when he was a teenager.  Years later that bully, Jake Mulligan (William McNamara), is a television evangelist who has bought a church in Easter Falls with the intent of destroying it and claiming the gold deposits beneath it for himself.  Only thing is the church was built by the grandfather of Anna Banana (Dominique Swain), Cotten's one-time crush.

When Peter tries to make friends with a genetically modified rabbit created by Dr. Serius Stanley (Gianni Capaldi) he is bitten and begins to change, becoming Rottentail, a violent, foul-mouthed rabbit person who has decided to take revenge on those that wrong Peter as well as do some extra-curricular killing on the side.  He is specifically aiming for Jake, against whom he still harbors anger for the death of his rabbit. 

Rottentail has the feel of a Troma film, right down to the acting.   The difference is it feels like Skiba knows instinctively how to film a scene so, at times, this doesn't feel as amateur as it should.  The design of the Rottentail suit works even if the CGI looks like it was done by a junior high school student.  In general, the jokes don't work, many being on the level of turd eating. 

What does work is General Phelps (Tank Jones) going into battle in a full priapic state and, although the hypocritical televangelist character has been done to death, many of the scenes that revolve around Mulligan are somewhat clever.  It is also nice to see Corin Nemec after all these years, but sad to see this is where he is getting employment.  Still, he endures being in the rabbit suit and does his best to sell the part even if the performance is too much like Beetlejuice. 

Rottentail could have been so much worse but, unfortunately, not much better.  It is what it is and hopefully Skiba will at some point realize that, unlike a lot of people who churn out z-grade films, he has some talent that shines through.  

Rottentail (2018)
Time: 106 minutes
Starring: Corin Nemec, Dominique Swain, William McNamara, Tank Jones
Director: Brian Skiba

 

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