WARNING: This film may cause disorientation, seizures, and uncontrollable eye-rolling. While I give props to Wendell Hubbard, the director of Recoil, for experimenting with the camera, after 200 ridiculous close-ups, shaky cameras, over-the-shoulder and beneath-the-crotch angles, and so-in-the-dark-you-can’t-make-out-anything shots, it’s too much to deal with. On top of that, the digital video is ultra-ultra low quality, and the sound is among the worst I’ve ever heard (or not heard).
Technical difficulties aside, Recoil deserves some credit for being “urban” without revolving around stereotypical ghetto life — gangs, drugs, government cheese and such — although the story is slooow and filled with annoying, unlikable characters who are doing stuff we couldn’t care less about. Combined with the ridiculous camerawork, the murky lighting and the mumbly sound, there’s no way anyone would want to put forth the herculean effort it takes to follow the plot.
But for the sake of posterity, it goes like this (from what I could figure out): High schooler Eric (Theodore Borders) gets knocked out one night, only to find that when he wakes up, his hand now has some secret government implant in it that shoots bullets or something. His mother yells at him, he goes to school, he walks around for a while, talks to his friend, some government suits push papers, there are some flashbacks, a bunch of stuff happens in the shadows and then I reach for the remote and turn this sheer torture of a film off.
