Here's my best description of Fort Doom - boring, boring, boring, unintentionally hilarious, boring. Yet another one of the countless low budget pieces of crap that have flooded the movie marketplace, this is thing is no more than two steps above a bunch of high school kids in 1992 grabbing one of their parents' video cameras and running out into the woods one weekend to make their own film as a lark. The marginally amusing outtakes that run during the closing credits are a billion times more entertaining than everything else in this motion picture put together.
The flaccid plot goes like this. In post-Civil War Missouri, a madam (Debbie Rochon) is taking her two whores (Melissa Paladino and Miya Sagara) and her virginal sister (Jennifer Lauren Grant) to set up a brothel near an abandoned fort. Along the way, they hook up with a budding nature photographer (Joshua Park). Nothing at all interesting happens for over an hour of screen time, and then our not-so-intrepid band is thrust into the middle of a ludicrous conspiracy involving horribly burned ex-Confederate soldiers who've been turned into brainwashed slaves by some sort of Old West plant concoction. A bunch of extras get dispatched like zombies in a Romero movie, Debbie Rochon bares a single breast and that's about it. Aside from a wet petticoat contest early on, I've just charitably described everything of any possible value in Fort Doom.
Let me be blunt about this. People are certainly entitled to make these kind of low-budget, amateurish productions. Everybody's got to start somewhere and Joshua Park does show glimmers of enough talent to be a professional actor, though looking like a bloated version of Screech from Saved By The Bell probably limits his career possibilities. But these pitiful creations should never be unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Even if you only paid 15 cents to watch Fort Doom, you'd still feel like you didn't get your money's worth. This is the most rudimentary filmmaking applied to a script where every scene appears to have been written 30 seconds before it was shot and performed by a cast that should have stayed behind the cash register at McDonald's.
On the off chance somebody involved with this film somehow happens to read this review, I want to focus on one specific example of the depressingly inept storytelling on display in Fort Doom. There are dozens and dozens of things I could bring up, but here's one to demonstrate I'm not unfairly maligning this production.
Toward the end of the movie, the young nature photographer reveals himself to be a Secret Service agent. Why? Because after wasting the audience's time for an hour, these filmmakers needed a character to vomit out a buttload of exposition in order to explain what the hell was going on. There are multiple opportunities to use multiple characters to convey the necessary information to the viewer, but these filmmakers leave it all to one scene with some half-assed revelation to justify it. They basically took the speech where the villain explains all of his plans and inserted it into the mouth of another character, then realized they had to explain how that character knew all that stuff. And then, they go on to actually have a scene where the villain DOES explain his plans. These James Bondian scenes are always fairly lame and this film has two of them that happen almost back-to-back. That may seem like a little thing given acting that wouldn't pass muster at community theater and scenes that look like they were shot for the public access show of a local travel agent, but I wanted to provide at least one concrete example of how the people behind Fort Doom had no idea what they were doing.
There's virtually no way and anyone could enjoy anything about this film. By the time it becomes unintentionally hilarious, you've already suffered through so much bad acting, awful directing and even worse writing that there's no relief to be had. Avoid Fort Doom like the plague.
The flaccid plot goes like this. In post-Civil War Missouri, a madam (Debbie Rochon) is taking her two whores (Melissa Paladino and Miya Sagara) and her virginal sister (Jennifer Lauren Grant) to set up a brothel near an abandoned fort. Along the way, they hook up with a budding nature photographer (Joshua Park). Nothing at all interesting happens for over an hour of screen time, and then our not-so-intrepid band is thrust into the middle of a ludicrous conspiracy involving horribly burned ex-Confederate soldiers who've been turned into brainwashed slaves by some sort of Old West plant concoction. A bunch of extras get dispatched like zombies in a Romero movie, Debbie Rochon bares a single breast and that's about it. Aside from a wet petticoat contest early on, I've just charitably described everything of any possible value in Fort Doom.
Let me be blunt about this. People are certainly entitled to make these kind of low-budget, amateurish productions. Everybody's got to start somewhere and Joshua Park does show glimmers of enough talent to be a professional actor, though looking like a bloated version of Screech from Saved By The Bell probably limits his career possibilities. But these pitiful creations should never be unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Even if you only paid 15 cents to watch Fort Doom, you'd still feel like you didn't get your money's worth. This is the most rudimentary filmmaking applied to a script where every scene appears to have been written 30 seconds before it was shot and performed by a cast that should have stayed behind the cash register at McDonald's.
On the off chance somebody involved with this film somehow happens to read this review, I want to focus on one specific example of the depressingly inept storytelling on display in Fort Doom. There are dozens and dozens of things I could bring up, but here's one to demonstrate I'm not unfairly maligning this production.
Toward the end of the movie, the young nature photographer reveals himself to be a Secret Service agent. Why? Because after wasting the audience's time for an hour, these filmmakers needed a character to vomit out a buttload of exposition in order to explain what the hell was going on. There are multiple opportunities to use multiple characters to convey the necessary information to the viewer, but these filmmakers leave it all to one scene with some half-assed revelation to justify it. They basically took the speech where the villain explains all of his plans and inserted it into the mouth of another character, then realized they had to explain how that character knew all that stuff. And then, they go on to actually have a scene where the villain DOES explain his plans. These James Bondian scenes are always fairly lame and this film has two of them that happen almost back-to-back. That may seem like a little thing given acting that wouldn't pass muster at community theater and scenes that look like they were shot for the public access show of a local travel agent, but I wanted to provide at least one concrete example of how the people behind Fort Doom had no idea what they were doing.
There's virtually no way and anyone could enjoy anything about this film. By the time it becomes unintentionally hilarious, you've already suffered through so much bad acting, awful directing and even worse writing that there's no relief to be had. Avoid Fort Doom like the plague.