Luderdale

Drop your cannoli and get the gang together to hunt down the kick-the-door-down great gangster flick Luderdale, written and directed by your new family enforcer, Thom Mills. Set at the very dawn of the 80s, we meet Hutch (John Gargan), an Irish boy who works for a business controlled by the Italian mob. He runs a rigged carnival game in New York for Whitey (Clayton Louis), scamming customers and skimming cash for himself. When caught, he gets a brutal beating from Mr. J (Joe Chambrello), who tells Hutch he’ll have to work off his debt—or else.

While working one of Mr. J’s shady jobs, Hutch stumbles upon something terrible hidden inside a warehouse. The discovery shakes him, but the story quickly shifts to under the Florida sun. Hutch, now bleached blond and living in Fort Lauderdale, rides a bike along the beach. A woman in a bikini top (Sophie Swiszcz) offers him Quaaludes for sale—a sign of the decadent times. He soon knocks on the door of a shuttered beachfront hotel, where Nicky (Austin Valli) and Tommy (Christian Shupe) are holed up.

The two mobsters are suspicious of Hutch’s sudden arrival. Nicky, high on cocaine, and Tommy, the muscle of the pair, assume Hutch might be a cop. After a tense confrontation, Nicky hires him anyway. Their plan is to reopen the run-down hotel and turn it into a moneymaking paradise by undercutting nearby resorts. They even have their own lifeguard, Candy (Ayden Skye), who keeps watch from her shack outside.

“Hutch, now bleached blond and living in Fort Lauderdale, rides a bike along the beach.”

As the new business unfolds, paranoia runs high. Nicky worries that his father’s old criminal connections may have tracked him down. He uses Hutch as an errand boy while Tommy keeps a constant eye on him. .

Luderdale is one of the most immersive mafia films yet. Mills drops the audience right into the nightmare world of organized crime, showing how easy it is to get pulled in and never get out. He understands that for many, the underworld carries a dangerous allure—especially in the sun-soaked sleaze of early 1980s Florida.

The film captures the tone of an era where cocaine, cheap ludes, and greed ruled. The title itself is a stroke of retro genius, pulling its name from Fort Lauderdale’s real-life reputation for excess. For those who grew up dreaming of gangster flicks instead of westerns, this movie is pure cinematic nostalgia.