Frogs for Snakes

Screenwriting formulas dictate that for a movie to work, it needs to introduce the gist of its plot within the first 10 minutes. Frogs for Snakes, a particularly dreary rehash of everyone's favorite post-Tarantino indie-film standbys, snappy patter and gore, proves the point—even when it's over you can't tell what it was about. The film follows a few days in the life of a group of would-be East Village actors who spend a lot more time shooting guns than acting. To make ends meet, they're all working for the local loan shark, whose business consists mostly of him hiring his own employees to kill each other. Unwieldy actor-criminal metaphors aside, writer- director Amos Poe (a local filmmaker you'd think would have more insight on the scene, or at least a better sense of the neighborhood geography) briefly captures some of the desperation and sycophancy innate to being a struggling artist, but quickly abandons any connection to reality in favor of potty-mouthed speechifying and gunfights passed off as punch lines. It's enough to make you wish Pulp Fictionhad never existed.