Cinematical

The sell-by date on Pulp Fiction knock-offs was about 1999, but the makers of Ten 'til Noon apparently didn't get the memo -- this is another one of those movies in which an erudite mafioso holds a gun on someone for what seems like forever, all the while making with the faux-profound verbalizing like a second-year philosophy undergrad. Unfortunately, the film's problems go a lot deeper than that. The premise, which is hidden for as long as director Scott Storm can possibly hide it, is that a businessman inventor named Larry (Rick Wasserman) is being rubbed out by what seems like the West L.A. mob because his corrupt partner wants to take over the company, and has made a deal with the mob to bump off Larry. You see, Larry is the brains behind the company, so killing him will drive down the company's stock price and let the mob and the corrupt partner buy the company cheap. There are so many illogical things in that premise that I hope I don't have to pinpoint them.

The only question we have to answer about Ten 'til Noon is whether it rises to the level of bad-good, or is merely bad. I'm tempted to say that it makes the grade on that front, because it's fascinating to watch no-name, Cinemax-ready actors being forced to put on these very specific, mannered characters and recite dialogue that no human being would ever speak. I'm thinking in particular of 'Miss Milch,' a suited hitwoman character played by Jenya Lano. Miss Milch clearly doesn't know what she's doing in this picture any more than I do, but she affects a haughty, corporate vice president demeanor that is supposed to give her character some kind of edge as she goes about spilling exposition in the second act. All of the characters in the film are, like Miss Milch, put ons, and so is the film's stuck-in-neutral morality. There's a big body count, but some of the deaths are played for laughs, while others I think we're actually supposed to care about, although it's sometimes hard to tell which is which.

The most bizarre, unrecognizably human character in the film is Larry's wife, Becky, played by actress Rayne Guest, whose recent character credits on IMDB include Adventure Girl and Spilled Beer Girl. One of the film's quirks is that it mostly happens within a period of about ten minutes, cutting back and forth between a group of major characters who are all making decisions about each other at the same time. We first see Becky enthusiastically engaged in amorous activities with a man in a hotel room, and later learn that she's only doing this because it's part of a plan to save her husband's life. When watching the film, the logical fallacies hit you over the head like a two-by-four, so with all the time that it takes to make a movie, you have to assume they occurred to the actors as well, so a late scene in which we see Becky calling her husband, explaining what her sex romp has to do with saving him from the manicured mobsters, has all the surrealism of an Andy Warhol film.

Another basic human quality the film has no handle on is humor. There's a running gag about the big boss character being called gay by his wife, and then it turns out that he actually is gay -- hardy har. We're also treated to a cringe-worthy scene in which two mob underlings sit and watch a sex video and masturbate together. I can tell that the director thought this would be funny for the audience, but it just falls squarely into the category of 'things I never needed to see in my life.' We don't even find out why these two guys prefer to spruce up their work day with joint jerk-off sessions, because soon after they are introduced, they are bumped off. Ten 'til Noon is the kind of movie where every scene is layered with some gag, and it's all supposed to add up to a witty film -- the problem is that very few of the gags actually work, and the viewer is constantly reminded that the film is not on speaking terms with reality.

Creating a movie with a heightened reality -- successfully heightened, into something interesting -- is probably among the most difficult things a director can accomplish, so the fact that Pulp Fiction was so insanely popular means we'll probably be occasionally treated to these third-rate knockoffs for the next twenty years or so, until some other new thing comes along that everyone insists on glomming onto. It's just an inevitable fact of movie life. Still, talent is talent, and sometimes Pulp knockoffs have real directors behind them, like Doug Liman with Go, but more often they don't, as in this case. Ten 'til Noon is a movie that doesn't trust the audience to settle for any kind of real movie-watching experience, so it loads up every frame with a lot of smoke and mirrors and counts on getting a lot of points for being clever, when it's oh-so-apparently not. So if you're a fan of the 'Pulp Fiction genre,' do your homework and find something more enjoyable to watch than this.