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Bellflower is an interesting film, overall, but not one that I particularly enjoyed or can recommend. It is pretty cool in a lot of ways, too, but unfortunately its flaws scream a little bit louder than its successes. A dude named Evan Glodell wrote, directed and starred in this film, which is obviously a pretty great accomplishment in and of itself. He apparently modified some gear and ended up with a unique camera that creates a really cool over-saturation of images.

The first half or so of the film is pretty great, interesting and watchable. Then it gets all weird (as my friend John says, “As soon as he had a beard, it went downhill!”). The film’s look is pretty unique (although it did remind me a bit of “Domino”) and switched between vastly different types of looks. I’m not sure if there was any relationship between the type of camera used and character/story/etc, but it looked cool. The dialogue was pretty believable at times, and pretty horrible at others. The story ended up being so extreme and out of left field in the second half, and was kind of confusing with the way the timeline was edited that it ended up being a big mess. After thinking about it a bit, I was able to conclude that it is essentially a story of friendship but unfortunately this is overpowered by explosions, guns, blood, Mad Max, a lot of alcohol and most of all, bad editing.

I do applaud the effort and I’m glad that I saw it, but it certainly doesn’t measure up to a lot of other first-time directors whose work I have seen. I feel like this is kind of a typical “first film” but what I liked, I liked ad will certainly check out whatever Glodell does next.