The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Woodrow (Glodell) and Aiden (Dawson) are two grown men who are just a
teensy bit too infatuated with Mad Max.
Their lives revolve around achieving this very immature standard of cool involving
flame throwers, tricked-out muscle cars, endless bottles of beer and dominating
‘their’ women. They wait around for the apocalypse, when they’ll be able to
finally live out their Mad Max
fantasies, while doing absolutely nothing else with their lives and it’s a
wonder how they even finance all the above but who cares? It’s a movie, right?

Woodrow falls for Milly (Wiseman), a girl he meets at the bar during a
competition that involves eating live bugs. On their first date, they
spontaneously drive halfway across America to Texas, where Woodrow
spontaneously trades his car for a beat-up black motorbike because he thinks it
looks appropriately apocalyptic. Their relationship grows stronger, leaving
Woodrow with little time to help Aiden build the flamethrower, though they do
eventually succeed.

Soon enough, things turn sour. Woodrow walks in on Milly sleeping with another
man. He beats the crap out of him, only to storm out of the house right into
the path of a speeding car. Severely messed up both physically and emotionally,
he starts sleeping with Courtney (Brandes), Milly’s best friend and Aiden’s
sometimes crush, but he still can’t get over Milly.

He spends his time lost in
violent daydreams, in which he contemplates maiming, disfiguring and murdering
everyone he knows. To get him out of this funk, Aiden talks Woodrow into
leaving town in this totally tricked out car that he’s been working on for a
hick town where they’d be the coolest people ever. The end.

If you take this film as a study of how violent and fantastical films
and the definition of cool that they expound can warp our brains, then the film
is actually quite interesting. It’s too bad that both leads, Woodrow and Milly,
are so irritating. They both come across as highly insufferable and thoroughly
self-absorbed; and it is genuinely hard to find one reason to give a damn about
them. Woodrow being present in practically every single scene in the film
doesn’t help much either, neither does the script that basically consists of
‘this is so nice’ and ‘what’s up dude?’

Every frame of Bellflower
looks like it was heavily processed through Hipstamatic, which just accentuates
the film’s cooler-than-thou posturing. The editing is rather confusing,
especially towards the end when the film kept going back and forth in time and
between Woodrow’s reality and his deranged revenge fantasies. However, the
explosions and makeup were really good, especially considering the absolutely
miniscule budget that the filmmakers were working with.

How much you’ll like this film hinges on your tolerance of that breed of
human known as the insufferable man-child, and this reviewer doesn’t mean the
funny stoner Judd Apatow type either. These people actually take themselves
seriously.