Do you remember that TV show from the 1980s called "Tales from the Darkside"? It was like a horror-themed version of "The Twilight Zone". Well, Southern Man looks and feels like a really long and bad episode of that show, except instead monsters and magic, the story is chock full of overwrought, chicken-fried melodrama.
An actor (Mark Withers) sits at the bedside of an old man in Los Angeles. When the old man dies, it launches the actor on a cross country journey to Nashville to kidnap the son of Lauren Jessup (Ellia Vierling) and demand that Lauren's father pay the ransom. The abusive and hateful Jacob Jessup (Jack Betts), however, is on a hunting trip for the weekend and won't be back until Sunday evening. That gives the actor time to bond with Lauren's son Jeffrey (Jesse Head) and check with his agent back in LA about whether he got a part, while Lauren takes advantage of the time to play private eye and try to discover the reason behind her son's abduction. When Jacob returns home, his weakling of a wife (Leigh Rose) manages to shame him into paying the ransom and they, along with Lauren, drive out to the cabin where Jeffrey's being held. If this sequence of events seems a little odd to you, you're right. Southern Man isn't even remotely interested in a realistic depiction of a kidnapping.
With the whole gang at the cabin, the movie finishes up with a very long scene where all the secrets behind the story come out, people are shot and we get a whole bunch of ridiculously contrived dialog that sounds an awful lot like filmmaker Rick Rosenberg was working out some personal issues of his own through this script.
On the plus side for this film are the performances of Mark Withers and Ellia Vierling. Their characters are rather shallowly drawn and behave quite stupidly, but they manage to rise above it. The true test of an actor is giving a good performance with bad material. This script calls on Withers and Vierling to excessively emote and I don't think either of their characters had a single intelligent thought throughout the entire movie. Even carrying that heavy burden, Withers and Vierling manage to make you care just a little bit about what happens to the actor and Lauren. They aren't great performances by any objective standard, but they'd be worthy of best acting nominations in the Subjective Academy Awards.
Southern Man also isn't completely boring. I've sat through a lot of films where I would have been happy to have a wild boar burst through my front door and start eating my left foot, just so it would take my mind off the lifeless, pointless, who-could-have-ever-thought-this-was-a-good-idea movie I was watching. As bad as Southern Man is, it doesn't fall into that category.
But just in case I haven't been clear so far, this is a baaaaad film. Its plot is poorly constructed. Its shocking mystery is decidedly unshocking. Its characters are nothing but pawns moved hither and yon in defiance of how real people would actually behave in these situations. It is completely uninspired and hackneyed visually, except for one scene that is ludicrously shot exclusively in extreme close-up. Basically, this is like a cheap exploitation film without nudity and virtually no violence or profanity.
I don't know what the motivation was for making Southern Man. I can only guess that the big secret of the script was something from the real lives of one of these filmmakers and it meant so much to them, it blinded them to every other terrible thing in the movie. Which would make this film a good reminder that just because something is meaningful to you, that doesn't make it meaningful or interesting to anyone else.
An actor (Mark Withers) sits at the bedside of an old man in Los Angeles. When the old man dies, it launches the actor on a cross country journey to Nashville to kidnap the son of Lauren Jessup (Ellia Vierling) and demand that Lauren's father pay the ransom. The abusive and hateful Jacob Jessup (Jack Betts), however, is on a hunting trip for the weekend and won't be back until Sunday evening. That gives the actor time to bond with Lauren's son Jeffrey (Jesse Head) and check with his agent back in LA about whether he got a part, while Lauren takes advantage of the time to play private eye and try to discover the reason behind her son's abduction. When Jacob returns home, his weakling of a wife (Leigh Rose) manages to shame him into paying the ransom and they, along with Lauren, drive out to the cabin where Jeffrey's being held. If this sequence of events seems a little odd to you, you're right. Southern Man isn't even remotely interested in a realistic depiction of a kidnapping.
With the whole gang at the cabin, the movie finishes up with a very long scene where all the secrets behind the story come out, people are shot and we get a whole bunch of ridiculously contrived dialog that sounds an awful lot like filmmaker Rick Rosenberg was working out some personal issues of his own through this script.
On the plus side for this film are the performances of Mark Withers and Ellia Vierling. Their characters are rather shallowly drawn and behave quite stupidly, but they manage to rise above it. The true test of an actor is giving a good performance with bad material. This script calls on Withers and Vierling to excessively emote and I don't think either of their characters had a single intelligent thought throughout the entire movie. Even carrying that heavy burden, Withers and Vierling manage to make you care just a little bit about what happens to the actor and Lauren. They aren't great performances by any objective standard, but they'd be worthy of best acting nominations in the Subjective Academy Awards.
Southern Man also isn't completely boring. I've sat through a lot of films where I would have been happy to have a wild boar burst through my front door and start eating my left foot, just so it would take my mind off the lifeless, pointless, who-could-have-ever-thought-this-was-a-good-idea movie I was watching. As bad as Southern Man is, it doesn't fall into that category.
But just in case I haven't been clear so far, this is a baaaaad film. Its plot is poorly constructed. Its shocking mystery is decidedly unshocking. Its characters are nothing but pawns moved hither and yon in defiance of how real people would actually behave in these situations. It is completely uninspired and hackneyed visually, except for one scene that is ludicrously shot exclusively in extreme close-up. Basically, this is like a cheap exploitation film without nudity and virtually no violence or profanity.
I don't know what the motivation was for making Southern Man. I can only guess that the big secret of the script was something from the real lives of one of these filmmakers and it meant so much to them, it blinded them to every other terrible thing in the movie. Which would make this film a good reminder that just because something is meaningful to you, that doesn't make it meaningful or interesting to anyone else.
