Chaos
Review by Mari Lynne Rupp

Most filmmakers strive to evoke emotion, strong emotion from their audience.. Passion, revulsion, fear, love, hate, nausea. Writer and director David DeFalco achieves this in spades with his 2005 film, CHAOS.

The audience of the very dark and disturbing CHAOS is treated to 74 minutes of sheer high tension. In CHAOS, this sense of horrific high anxiety is driven by a very tangible reality of evil, wandering, psychotic bandits in the form of “Eddie ‘Chaos’ Cooper,” played by Kevin Gage (STRANGELAND, Michel Mann’s HEAT, BLOW), “Frankie,” played by Stephen Wozniak (HOPE RANCH, BEYOND THE DAVINCI CODE), “Daisy” (KC Kelly) and “Swan,” played by son of Sylvester Stallone and cast member of THE MANSON FAMILY, Sage Stallone. Watching the CHAOS gang lure, torture and kill unsuspecting wanderers in a creepy forest setting was utterly disturbing. Such scenes brought to mind similar plots in Wes Craven’s THE HILLS HAVE EYES and, of course, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, where some would say there was an unnecessary amount of violence for violence’s sake. The director’s vision in this film focused more on the visceral experience of violence rather than its gratuitous counterpart. DeFalco explored base human fears: fear of strangers, fear of pain, a parent’s fear of their child’s endangerment, fear of loss of control, fear of isolation. He uses these fears as torture instruments - as skillfully as “Eddie ‘Chaos’ Cooper” manipulates his knives on victims - to evoke emotion from his audience. Strong, raw emotion.

The LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD victimization aspect of CHAOS was nicely but predictably played out by Maya Barovich (“Angelica”) and Chantal DeGroat (in the role of “Emily”). Both actresses turned out fine performances. In CHAOS, the girls leave an all night rave in order to score some drugs with “Swan,” only to find out that they’ve been lured to a secluded and abandoned dwelling for games of cat-and-mouse with the rest of the troupe. The audience here is provided the uncertainty of “leaving the forest path for the wolf” storyline. Even the most hardcore movie watchers will squirm at the scenes which unfold at that point, including a delirious and queasy one that features “Daisy” hunting down and tackling one of the girls on an old and withered suspension bridge. I can see that DeFalco’s goal was similar to Craven’s from LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, which is really about the inescapable awful reality that is the victims’ fate.

Evoking emotion, playing with fear. This idea is evident even before the first scene, when we see a scrolling public service announcement at the beginning that acts as a disturbing warning to parents and young people alike. This alone should alert viewers that they are not going to be treated to a Britney Spears-like video of “bad guy” killings or witness a virile young heroine wielding a chainsaw to save the day. Tapping into what a human is capable of doing to another human, the film shows us what a parent would do if faced with their child’s captor, as the character “Leo Collins” realizes he has come face to face with his daughter’s murderers. The change in his demeanor, from passive father - ready to let his little bird fly from the nest - to aggressive papa bear, is certainly worth watching, as Scott Richards gives a great performance in this role.

The suspense is brilliantly directed and the actors give us fluid performances on all sides, building up to the jaw-dropping climax and a genuine holy-shit-did-you-see-that ending. Think you know how it’s going to end? Think again. On a technical level, the direction, as I’ve indicated, provides the storyline an easy flow. The editing and camera work are also extremely effective.

I came away from this movie feeling slightly disturbed and quite uneasy. Again, that’s the filmmaker’s goal – to essentially make you feel. In that case, well done Dave DeFalco.