Ski Mask (Dave Smith) runs a gang of masked criminals that has a big
networ all over the city and ties to the police that should keep
complications of his back ... but that only works as long as he and his
boys concentrate on black market crime, drug pushing and things like that
- business that's not quite legal, so to speak. Now though, ganbmember
Meathead (David Kolenski) has picked up the habit of dragging beautiful
women into his car and killing them - something that goes beyond even the
tolerance of Ski Mask's police officer of trust (Michael Adam). But since
this officer of trust is way too dependant on Ski Mask's money, he gives
him fair warning and expects Ski Mask to sort things out rather than
booking Meathead himself and risking to blow the lid off Ski Mask's
outfit. Problem is of course, Meathead is a madman as insane as they
come, and he can't just be talked out of killing women - so Ski
Mask decides to go on a girl-killing excursion with him, to try to somehow
get rid of him in the process ... which might be a bigger bite than Ski
Mask can swallow ... Now admittedly, on a narrative level, Blackbags
is not the most original of films, and also admittedly, most of the
characters are as faceless as the masks they are wearing - but at roughly
20 minutes running time, this hardly matters with this movie, because it
moves along at a breakneck speed, something that's only augmented by the
movie's excessive use of rapid zoom-ins and zoom-outs (that though always
match the current mood of the story), its pulse-pounding soundtrack and of
course clever editing. Now add to this some grainy black and white
visuals, and you've got yourself a pretty unusual genre flick - that maybe
shouldn't be longer than 20 minutes, to be quite honest - but then again
it isn't!
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