Three life-long pals stage a gag at a bank and run into some criminals planning to rob the bank. The criminal boss is Rourke a creepy psychopath exploiting his gunsel, Baldwin, the piteously warped product of a prison upbringing. The pals have Arquette as their ring leader, who's escaping the rage and numbness his parents model. To Jason London these guys are brothers, his surrogate family. Blechman, the lowly little guy, hero worships Arquette, who in his crazy way is his mentor. (If these guys seem gay to you, get well so maybe you can have a friend someday.) The two gangs get mixed up and separated at the bank, then Rourke makes a bad situation desperate and, for Baldwin, tragic. When Sheryl Lee shows up the power balance goes seismic in the best noir style. Rourke controls with intimidating innuendo that shocks by turning the tables on us and our usual voyeuristic experience of some cliché villain leering while he cuts a bra away. To say you'll be the one who feels discomfort doesn't begin to describe the debasement and violation he exerts with his cold games. (Those who find these any kind of erotic need to get well also.) The acting, direction, and writing go beyond the now familiar story of a botched bank heist to explore how the hunger to be with others spares from danger only the least human.

Fall Time is an incredibly absurd crime drama that fails on most levels. David Arquette, Jason London, and Jonah Blechman star as three teenage lads who decide to play a prank on the grownups in their boring 1950s backwoods town. Normal, run of the mill teens would TP town hall, put itching powder in the school principal's undergarments, or short sheet each others beds. These bright sparks decide to stage a phony assassination outside the local bank, where, just by chance, two real cons (Mickey Rourke, who phones in his performance, and Stephen Baldwin) are about to hold up the joint. The prank and the robbery go the way of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup ("you got your practical joke in my two-bit heist!" "No, you got your two-bit heist in my practical joke!") and mayhem, torture, gunplay, and a homo-erotic subplot take us the rest of the way. Though someone clearly spent a lot of time making sure the period details were right, someone else--presumably screenwriters Steve Alden and Paul Skemp-- larded their absurd story with too many handy dandy coinkidinks. The film also suffers from a portentous score from composer Hummie Mann, which elevates the final scene--involving a fresh baked pie from good ol' Mom--to the overdone levels of a Richard Harris and Jimmy Webb collaboration. Fall Time also features the world's least believable sex scene (involving Sheryl Lee). This is one of those American indies that thinks it's being deep, but merely buries itself in pretentious tomfoolery.

Rebellious post-high school buddies Tim (Jason London), Dave (David Arquette), and Joe (Jonah Blechman) are in the middle of their last summer together. Tim is off to college in the fall, and wherever the other two wind up, it will not be in the same place he will be. So the three of them, the bored threesome decide to pull of their most elaborate prank of all time. The plan is simple. Tim, all decked out in a nice suit that makes him slightly more than conspicuous in a small town like Caledonia, Wisconsin, will stand on a street corner near the bank, while the other two pull up fast in their black Buick (stolen from Dave's cruel father) and pretend, with blanks, to gun him down in the street, toss him into the trunk and speed away. After this reports about the Buick will be all over the news, and Dave's father will have a heavy dose of explaining to do. But while they plan the lark, ex-cons Florence (Mickey Rourke), and Leon (Stephen Baldwin) are planning to rob the very same bank. When the boys mistakenly abduct Leon (who is dressed in a suit similar to Tim's), and in effect, foil the crime, the stronger Florence immediately hunts down the suspicious Tim, and strong-arms him into assisting in the heist without Leon. Leon, meanwhile, once out of the trunk, easily detains Dave and Joe, and begins a paranoid investigation of their true motives before forcing Dave to reel off a conspiracy tale about himself and Florence, exactly what the very edgy Leon wants to hear. Leon, who is shown through his homosexual relationship with Florence (which began while the two served time) as being subservient and pliant, explodes when given the opportunity to call the shots for the two young boys, and becomes unhinged to the tune of torturous interrogation scenes that are almost too emotionally painful to watch. What follows is a violent, icy depiction of loss of innocence in the Eisenhower America, which ends the only way it can, with bodies on the floor. Though the film, made in 1995, was denied a theatrical release by co-stars bickering over billing, director Paul Warner spins a tightly wound tale of a adolescent joy-ride that goes awfully wrong. And perhaps the most interesting spin on the script is the parallel between the subservient relationship of Leon to Florence to the hero-worship Joe holds for Dave, and even paralleling Leon's treatment of the boys with the relationship of Dave to his father. This amounts to a perverse little twist of script that Freudians would love, where the two criminals do serve to provide a sort of perverse fathering of the children. The young cast is outstanding, exuding the requisite disbelief and innocence we expect from these boys. A particular standout is Arquette, who I previously did not feel could act his way out of a paper bag. Mickey Rourke is absolutely chilling as Florence, and Baldwin gives perhaps even a better performance than he did in The Usual Suspects, an absolutely brilliant turn as the explosive Leon. In all, Fall Time is a very good movie that snuck through the cracks, and is well worth a look if you can find a copy.

Spoilers.This is an intense little flick, but also a sickfest of tied-up guys being tormented and nearly suffocated while other people sit nearby and struggle or discuss, and criminals just a little to easy with each other's close proximity to welcome mainstream interest. Guys cry, guys wipe each other's tears; guys kill each other while bathing in each other's blood; guys sweat through each other's clothes. With all the exchanging of bodily fluids, I wish I could report the whole homoerotic gorefest is a metaphor for some disease or condition, but I don't believe that's the case. In an odd way, this is a lot like an Ed Wood film: A hand full of people, dropped in the middle of a flimsy /improbable situation fraught with more coincidence than a cliffhanging serial, and played with a straight face, as if any of this could ever really happen. It is not the smartest screenplay I have ever seen, but as I say, for a kind of desperate reverse-Xena appeal, this flick would be hard to beat. BOMB. AVOID AT ALL COSTS.