If, as the old saying goes, good things do indeed happen to good people, the flipside should hold true; bad things should happen to bad people. Fair enough. When a freaky and obnoxious bunch of killers, who call themselves “The Family,” kidnap R. K. Tipple (Thomas Angel), himself in the process of assaulting a pair of motorists, “We Await” appears to be playing by those rules. This is doubly true when the kidnappers, who claim they’ve been waiting for Mr. Tipple, break out the sacrificial carving knives. As they prepare to do bad things to their bad guest, one of them explains that her sister carries the child of The Wise One and the kid needs a hero’s soul. But look closer. In a twist of irony I doubt was intentional, veteran filmmaker Charles Pinion’s aggressively messy, post-punk riff on random violence winds itself up in a thematic rhetorical knot. Is it really “random” violence if The Family knew Tipple was coming? And if a cretin like Tipple is willing to sacrifice himself for an unborn child, is he really all that bad…or is he worse than bad because helping out any child born of someone these demonic people call “The Wise One” is probably not really a good thing.
Unfortunately, these useless musings from a desperate reviewer are reading far too much into this loudly scattered jumble. With the exception of a number of dated-looking psychotropic video acid trips, there’s just not that much here. I was far more interested in the fate that Tipple and his friends — a beefy biker dude handcuffed and dangling from the ceiling with metal clamps hanging from his naughty bits and his spike-haired girlfriend, who was using a blowtorch (!) to, um, warm said clamps– had in store for Tipple’s intended victims. Instead, not only are we stuck with the rather generic Family, we never find out who this mysterious Wise One is nor why anyone who calls himself the Wise One would hang out with these depressing slackers. A horrid fate, to be sure. So maybe bad things really do happen to bad people.
