Bound (2015)

Let’s talk about the Asylum film group.

Since 1997 the Asylum has been making what they called mockumentaries. Taking famous films and television shows and making their own versions.  The odds are that you’ve seen one and not even really known about it. They are basically the Weird Al of films.

Today we are looking at one of the worst of their productions: a send up of the movie 50 Shades of Grey. They take it in a different direction, I’ll admit, but think about this. We have a send up of a movie that began as fan fiction for the poorly named Twilight “Saga” (God help us all). This is Bound.

To say this is a bad movie almost goes without saying. Were you really expecting Oscar gold? The one funny thing about this movie is, due to a much faster production, it actually came out a month before 50 Shades of Grey. I think that might be the first time a movie rip off hits theaters before the movie it’s ripping off.

The director has stated several times that he didn’t care about quality he just wanted to”make a buck” and I’ll be blunt: I respect his honesty.

The lead actor Bryce Draper only signed on if the Asylum gave him a multiple film deal assuming this movie would (his words) “flop hard.” You have to love the confidence, but to be honest, I don’t really blame him.

Now let’s start with the good, and that is the acting. You can tell everybody is bringing their “A” game and given the writing here, that speaks volumes of the talent involved.

Charisma Carpenter, who many of you will remember from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin off Angel, leads the cast of relative unknowns, or at least relative unknowns to me. The only other person I recognized was former NFL star Terrell Owens.

The plot is about a woman in her 40’s being taken into the word of BDSM by a young man who turns out to be a pretty twisted person, imagine my surprise.

The main problem with both this and 50 Shades is that if you’re not into the whole BDSM thing (or the loose facsimile of purported BDSM on display), you’re really not going to care. The plot is just this side of an old “skinomax” flick and honestly I think it would have helped the film if the actors had been a little more hammy.

Taking the work so seriously takes away the one thing this movie could have had. It’s not good enough to recommend and it’s not bad enough to be “so bad it’s good.”

I won’t give away the ending should you decide to check it out, but I will say that it goes out to left field for no apparent reason. It honestly feels like they were out of ideas.

This review is short, but honestly, I don’t have much to say about this film. It left no real impact and felt like the idea of a movie that needed to be more fleshed out before it would really be a full film and not just a fragment jotted down on a film makers notebook.

Thank you very much for reading and I’ll see you next time.