All the drugs are going to be the least of your worries in this surreal slip into darkness in the strong indie mini-series Bleak Terminus, written and directed by Dan Bazan. It opens with a voice from a starry void speaking out across the cosmos to someone named Damien. We then land in a park where Judd (Wes Melton) is impatiently concluding a drug deal.
Back in his car with his drugs, Judd suddenly finds a blade against his neck from the back seat, being held by a masked Damien (Matt Tenny). Damien demands Judd unlock his phone and hand it over along with his wallet and anything else in his pockets. On the phone, Damien finds texts referring to the buying and selling of women. Damien then visits his old ex-drug buddy Ryan (Aashish Thakur), who has just finished shooting up.
The info that the masked Damien collects brings him to the door of Madam Philippe (Tracy Willet), who runs a dance academy with the help of her daughter, Missy (Leela Watts). The academy is a front for something darker, and so are Damien’s intentions. Damien is looking for a human trafficker who goes by the code name Mom (Thomas Brown), and nothing will get in the way of his path to vengeance. The further we go on his lethal trail, the thicker the mystery of who Damien really is becomes…
First off, Bleak Terminus is easily binge-worthy as a feature-length film, as all six episodes add up to a brisk 75 minutes. And you will feel that binging need to watch more pretty early in. By immediately providing the two scoops of heroin and human trafficking, Bazan sets up the dark continent that the movie will be living in. This would be more than enough to grab our attention, but Bazan has a larger agenda with his revenge tale.
“…Damien is looking for a human trafficker who goes by the code name Mom…”
First, he ratchets up the anticipation by limiting the audience’s perceptions. One recurring motif is every time Tenny lowers his mask, the audience only sees the reaction, not his face. Another move that crosses over into pure genius is when Melton asks what the pair of fellas, who are about to be executed, did to deserve such a fate. When Melton starts to explain, suddenly the audio becomes unintelligible, and Bazan jumps to a backlit cooler in the darkness. Then we smash cut back to Melton, who finishes his explanation. It is one of those crazy moments that when it hits, you realize Goddard was onto something. So is Bazan.
As the vendetta progresses, Bazan starts dropping stranger and stranger occurrences into the story. It is almost like the narrative dropped a blotter of acid in episode one, with the LSD building per episode until it peaks with episode six. It is so refreshing to reach the final act of a picture and still have no predictions as to how everything will wrap up.
The Lynchian Method is put to good use, including using the aforementioned glowing cooler as a regular motif, just like Lynch’s regular return to burning house imagery. Bazan’s cinematography is just as slick as his editing. Obviously, this director knows what he is doing and would blow the doors off if he was provided with a budget.
My only note of caution to Bazan is when you are working with micro-budgets, try to steer clear of using community colleges and other school-looking rooms when shooting. Even if the scene is set in a school, go out of your way to set it somewhere else. Go out in the forest; that always looks great in low-budget films. Locations that look like schools just make you think of student films, which is the opposite direction of the level of production quality found here.
Bleak Terminus succeeds in delivering platinum TV entertainment on a nickel-plated budget. Bazan is an excellent visual storyteller whose work will result in many well-fed eyeballs.
"…crosses over into pure genius..."
