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Reviews
Whacked (2004)
A provocative mind tease
Triple threat (writer,director,actor) Sirena Irwin is a tour de force in this highly engaging 12 minute dark comedy. Irwin, the director, ignites the viewer's imagination with hauntingly suspenseful cinematography while slapping said viewer down to the ground with one celluloid roundhouse to the buttocks after another. The viewer finds himself not injured but, instead, to have landed successfully each time smack dab on top of his funny bone. Cunningly, Irwin, the writer, sends us off in a cacophony of playful eroticism, lustful innocence and an all too rare gift for understated hilarity. That said, it is Irwin's on screen performance (the actor) that is of most particular note. The fair-haired beauty (think Olivia Newton-John meets Charo) is a duplicitous villainess heavily veiled by a sticky sweet, corn fed naivete and fueled by desirous deception. Had she not written the thing, I would be forced to wonder how such a perfect casting came to pass. Her co-star, Ian Gregory, gives a positively chilling, if unnerving, performance as her paramour-of-sorts. In" Whacked," Irwin has taken the comedy noir oeuvre and cracked it wide open, imbuing it with a contemporary sensibility. That's my time.