“One way or another I’m gonna find ya
I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha” – One Way or Another, Blondie
One summer afternoon, my brother and I pushed (neighborhood bully) Robbie off his Big Wheel for picking on our sister. That, either fortunately or unfortunately, is the extent of my personal revenge motifs.
In writer-director Chris Sun’s chilling Daddy’s Little Girl (released on May 13th, 2014 by Breaking Glass Pictures), an anguished father named Derek (a leveled, award winning Michael Thomson) takes comeuppance to the extreme when his 6 year old daughter (a perfectly angelic Billi Baker) is murdered. After stumbling upon the perpetrator of the crime, and also discovering that the savage criminal had multiple victims, Derek enacts a torturous revenge.
Despite the hard-to-take, real life nature of the subject, Sun ably divides this picture into distinct arcs (the set-up, the anguished downfall, the shocking realization, the plotting of and carrying out of the torturous revenge) and adds enough pulpy, 70s era grit to make the experience an frequently enjoyable and cinematically palatable one. The savagery of Derek’s retaliation is indeed hard-to-take, but Sun intersperses these bloody exchanges with scenes of a duo of dedicated detectives finally closing in on the culprit and some bizarrely enjoyable exchanges between Derek and his family members and friends.
Granted, Derek’s discovery of the killer happens a bit too conveniently and the evidence he finds is too out-in-the-open to be quite believable. But these are small flaws in Sun’s relentless vision. Its starkness, though, gains distinct justification by the true-to-life headlines that chillingly decorate the closing credits of the film.
Assisted by a charming, ingeniously crafted performance by Christian Radford as Derek’s roguish brother Tommy, Daddy’s Little Girl is a powerful mixture of grindhouse cinema and real life crime, well worth seeking out by the truly strong at heart.
You can keep up-to-date with Breaking Glass Pictures at http://www.breakingglasspictures.com and http://www.facebook.com/breakingglasspictures. The forces behind Daddy’s Little Girl post frequently at https://www.facebook.com/DLG666, as well.
Until the next time – SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!
Big Gay Horror Fan 