Pruitt, Cooper, and Twiggy are three soldiers on an extraction mission who accidentally crash their helicopter over enemy territory. They were receiving no incoming fire. The captain just lost control, and these soldiers nearly became one of those unfortunate casualties of war caused by mishap. Pruitt, the commander, is injured, so Cooper constantly helps him get along across the desert as Twiggy, who is only a clerk, quakes the whole way, absolutely terrified of the situation she’s in.
And then the bad guys show up. No, not the Taliban, but . . . something else. They’re kind of like zombies. Could they be demons? Djinn? Who knows?
This is the idea behind STITCHED, a short film written and directed by comic book genius Garth Ennis. However, whenever he writes war stories, he usually writes the kind that are more along the lines of “boys club” tales. Here, the only man in the trio is Pruitt, who is badly injured. Cooper, who is an absolute bad ass, has the balls of the group, despite actually lacking the physical kind.
Tank Jones plays Pruitt as best as he can. He can’t stretch out into the role as a longer feature would have allowed. Kate Kugler is decent as Twiggy, who reminds one of Dante from CLERKS when she says that she’s not even supposed to be here. The true stand-out in the cast, though, is Lauren Alonzo’s Cooper. She plays the bad ass to a T, especially as she chides Twiggy into reminding her training when they face off against the monsters.
As for the villains of the piece, they’re not bad. They could be better. The guys in the white robes play as zombies pretty well until the heroes get beyond their clothes, to the stitched eyes and mouths. But the effect looks too much like plastic to be taken seriously. We don’t get enough of a good look at their leader, the guy in the black robes, so one can’t really comment.
As to the other effects, namely that of the bodies, they could have been much better. The absurdity of their deaths would have played off well in comic books, but here in a movie, it comes off as kind of silly, especially the guy who had his intestines pulled out through his mouth. However, when one of the monsters gets shot in the head, and giant pieces of its head are blown off, it makes for a good effect.
This is the problem with the bad guys, though: if they’re such evil, mutilating bastards, why didn’t they do better against the soldiers? They just sort of . . . staggered around. The worst it got was when one of them pressed its fingers into Pruitt’s leg wound.
As far as criticisms go, that’s about all that can be found wrong with the film. The writing is superb, but that goes without question. Ennis is also a capable director. The opening scene with the three soldiers struggling across the desert is beautiful, perhaps inspired by Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.
The editing suffers a little bit, though, when it comes to transitions. When one scene moves into the next using a black out, kind of like the space a missing commercial leaves on a DVD of a TV show, it jars the viewers out of the movie. The pacing is a little bit off in the beginning, as well, but when Ennis’s other heroes show up, everything falls perfectly into place.
Other heroes? Remember how our trio is there on an extraction mission? These other heroes are the ones they’re here to extract. In a moment of absolute peril, one of them shoves an assault rifle in a bad guy’s face and says, “Don’t be a cunt, mate.” In true Garth Ennis fashion.
The sad thing is, this is only a prologue to a bigger story. STITCHED is going to be a series from Avatar by Ennis with art by Mike Wolfer. It promises to be a hell of a book. Don’t miss out on how it all began. Get STITCHED now.
STITCHED
Written and directed by Garth Ennis
Produced by Mischief Maker Studios
17 minutes
$15
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