zardoz-13 This low-budget crime caper about a quartet of clueless cretins who assemble to rob a bank qualifies as inspired lunacy. Director Gary Yates and scenarist Lee MacDougall have fashioned a funny little flick with good and bad characters. The morality of this piece is such that the robbers are punished for their notorious deeds. However, despite their abject failure to reap the benefits of their ill-gotten gains, the sympathetic ones are redeemed for a largely happy ending. The soundtrack ripples with memorable Top-40 hits, including Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," April Wine's "Say Hello," Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Have You Ever Seen The Rain." Clocking in at a spartan 79 minutes, "High Life" doesn't squander a second and drums up many surprises as well as a refreshing sense of spontaneity. The personalities of these small-time criminals are etched brilliantly, too. Dick (Timothy Olyphant of "Hitman") is a hospital janitor, but he doesn't hang onto this job for long. A former prison cell mate, Bug (Stephen Eric McIntyre of "The Lookout"), visits Dick at work, and Dick gets fired in short order for Bug's shenanigans. Dick's other loser friend Donnie (Joe Anderson) who knows how to steal purses and wallets and withdraw money from the owner's ATM accounts. Dick concocts a scheme where Donnie will pull out $60 and then use other cards to get $54o. Dick recruits a romantic looking French guy Billy (Rossif Sutherland of "Timeline") who will take both the receipt and the cash into the bank and complain to a teller. Dicks hopes that the bank will contact the repair crew, and Bug and he will masquerade as a repairmen and raid the ATMs. Dick's well-laid plans go awry when the pretty teller, Alma (Brittany Scobie of "The Plague"), that Billy sweet-talks, decides not to inform her manager that the ATMs are on the blink. Instead, she takes the cash for herself. Incredulously, our protagonists watch her stroll off to lunch with the $540.No sooner have our heroes witnessed this disaster than an armored truck whips up to the bank. Bug, who is high on cocaine, brandishes an arsenal of firearms. Billy pulls out his gun, too. Dick struggles to convince Bug and Billy from resorting to violence. Bug shoots Billy because these two haven't gotten along well since they met. Bug hijacks the armored truck with Donnie and his relative Lynn (Kelly Wolfman of "Reasonable Doubt") inside and takes it to their other former prison inmate friend, Moondog (Michael Bell of "Goon") who owns a garage. In a frenzy, Bug uses a jackhammer to drill a hole in the top of armored truck and pipe in carbon monoxide. He does this to flush Lynn and Donnie out of the vehicle. Meantime, Dick has helped Billy up off the pavement and put him in a car and they careen off to Moondog's garage. Dick watches as Bug pulls $300-thousand out of the armored truck. While nobody is looking, Lynn slips an exploding paint canister into the bag. Dick and Bug flee the scene to a ranch, but Dick refuses to ride off into the sunset with Bug."High Life" is an impressive comedy of errors. The cast is first-rate, especially Timothy Olyphant and Donald Sutherland's other son Rossif. Stephen Eric McIntyre makes a grim villain with a trigger happy streak in his warped psyche. Yates creates both suspense and comedy and the film never degenerates into a gritty, unsavory saga, as it could easily have done. I'd never heard of it unless I saw it on clearance sale at a Dollar General Discount store.

OJT How I love to discover hidden little gems like this dark comedy about a bunch if criminals. High on dope and low on IQ, high on aims but low on life, this film by Canadian director Gary Yates succeeds in being his most interesting so far.With a serious undertone, still the main thing of this film is to entertain, but also gives a good glimpse into the everyday life of petty time criminals addicted to drugs. And entertaining it is, if you're not expecting too much of an action flick.We meet Dick (Timothy Olyphant) and some of his bad buddies back in 1983, all dependent on drugs, and all except one, jail birds. Dick involves Bug, Don and Billy in a bank heist. Of course a very bad idea, with a very stupid gang, which has to go horribly wrong...Well acted by all, suitable for such a comedy. A great and very suitable score follows the film throughout, adding to the pleasant watch. You might want more of the ending, but otherwise this does the job. You also might react to the cars being used in the film is very worn to be in the eighties, and the Mercedes used there didn't come into production until 1986. But that shouldn't ruin your enjoyment of watching this. It's not by any means a fast paced film, more slow, but relying in he acting. Nice little film!

moderniste Many other reviews have covered the excellence of the stoned/junked-out humour and the overall kind of lackadaisical mood of entropy: everything going to a chaotic, baroque hell.What I really loved in this little movie was the attention to detail. The costumes and hair/makeup for instance are brilliant. Steven Eric McIntyre couldn't look greasier, and his cold gray eyes burn holes out of his pale grizzled face. He struts into his first scene wearing clapped out flares and some seriously flash rattlesnake cowboy boots, reminding me of legendary close-up shots of gunfighters' boots as they stride into the road for a battle. Bug Is Here and things are going to proceed downhill at a steady clip. Later, you see big black and silver rings and a huge silver belt buckle of galloping horses, that fit right in with Bug's self-image of a bad-arse cowboy pining for his horse, Jezebel. It's fitting that he dies in the saddle, no? Pretty boy Billy has the perfect Euro-boy new wave-ish uniform of stripy tight t-shirts and pegged black jeans, along with big 60-ish sideburns and a flop of wedge-cut hair that was the hipster haircut of the early 80s.Then there's some of the best use of soundtrack music I've heard in a while. The director has a similar gift for setting moods with music as does Scorcese and his legendary oeuvre that uses the Rolling Stones in pitch-perfect moments. This being a Canadian movie, it makes perfect sense to string the music of April Wine, along with screen shots of their vinyl albums and cassettes, throughout the movie. This band, along with CCR, 3 Dog Night and the kind of obscure (if you're not a Canadian who was in his 20s during the late 70s) Montreal recording artist, Pagliaro--set a very specific mood: that of balls to the wall lose your head stoner rock. I was a total new wave/mod/ska/punk snob in my early 1980s jr high and high school years, but I still have fond memories of secretly blasting stoner rock out of my headphones or car stereo and leaning back and just time traveling. This kind of epic release is what all of the characters in this film are searching for.Lastly, there are the strange and wondrous uses of visual motifs: specifically, pink and horses. The morphine pills are bright pink as they are crushed in the ice cream scooper, then dissolved into a brilliant pink solution that courses through the veins of Bug, Billy and Dick. Billy eats a pink fluff of cotton candy, and the ice cream Bug pulls out of the freezer as they are cooking pink morphine in Dick's apartment, is pink strawberry ice cream. Junkies crave sugar, and in this movie, it's pink sugar that is their cracked ambrosia. When we first see Bug and Dick cooking up and getting high, there's a junky dream of thick pink slop reminiscent of the "cook" dripping over the edge of a cardboard box. (Incidentally, that box has an image of a big red barn that perfectly syncs with the big red barn that contains the horses that Bug finds at the end of the movie.) Then there's the mother of all pink paint bombs that so hilariously covers Bug and Dick, making Bug look like, in Dick's words, "a f*#king pink Chuck Norris".And then there's the horses. First, we see them on Bug's belt buckle, and then he has a junky vision of a horse standing over him that he calls "Jezebel". (A childhood memory of a long lost pet? A sly reference to the junky slang word for heroin--"horse"?) Bug fancies himself to be a kind of twisted cowboy, and he meets his storied end covered with pink paint on the back of a beloved horse, on his way to South America. I just love that kind of attention to detail--it's what makes me want to watch this film over and over. And since "High Life" is on heavy rotation on Showtime, that's exactly what I've been doing, with the speakers turned up to 11.

intelearts This is low down fun. It has a very well-scripted, plotted, and thought through feel to it and there really are worse ways to send your time.It reminded us a lot of Australian cinema, where losers just keep on losing but just more and more outrageously, and it is a film that makes you laugh mostly 'cos it ain't you.All the characters are exactly that, characters, and all of them are nicely done. Everything from the get go just works and the take on the 80s is pitch perfect - no Reaganomics and Wall Street here, this is 70s hangover time to perfection.A fun little movie with heart, drugs, and great, great incompetence...