The Demolisher
Everything about this film screams cold, dark revenge and vigilante justice never looked so good. I’ve been excited to see the film since the release of the very first trailer, so the feature has been right at the top of my list and it did not disappoint. For a film called the Demolisher, it was a lot more thoughtful and experimental than I was expecting. It plays with its narrative, bouncing around in time between reality and a dream state. That said, there are plenty of baton beatings to go around.
Bruce’s (Ry Barrett) wife was disabled in an altercation with gang members when she was a police woman. The man becomes an armor-clad vigilante, going out night after night to exact revenge on the gang members responsible for the attack. The more time he spends as the Demolisher, the more obsessed with revenge and unglued he becomes. This comes to include bystanders and culminates with his insane pursuit of a young woman he believes to be in the gang.
There is the most amazing dark cinematography and neon lighting right out of the early 1980’s, a Carpenter homage at its finest. Ry Barrett is the very heart of the film, playing Bruce with an unhinged edge that you can watch grow scene by scene and he’s physically imposing enough to pull off the unstoppable Demolisher. The Demolisher here is a constant pursuing nightmare like Michael Myers or Jason Vorhees, only in the form of one insanely angry man. More than just a revenge film, writer/director Gabriel Carrer takes the film’s story in a completely unique direction. He creates a character study in descending into grief and madness. The Demolisher’s point of view saves it from slipping into what would be very familiar genre territory and keeps things fresh and the audience guessing.
Adam Ruhl is a writer and life long Cinephile. He is the Executive
Cinema Editor of Pop Culture Beast’s Austin branch; covering festivals,
conventions, and new releases. When not filing reports, Adam can be
found stalking Alamo Drafthouse Programmers for leads on upcoming
DrafthouseFilms titles. Adam once blocked Harry Knowles entrance to a
theater until he was given extra tickets to a Roman Polanski movie.