With Red Cockroaches, Cuban director Miguel Coyula makes an ambitious full-length film debut and for what he's wrung out of his miniscule two-thousand-dollar budget he should be extremely proud of himself. Writing, directing, editing, producing, composing the score, and doing the digital effects himself Coyula proves to be a "jack of all trades" and with the promise shown here let's hope he gets a bigger budget to work with.

Intended as the first entry in a planned trilogy, Red Cockroaches is loaded to the hilt with experimental imagery, mysterious tone, and an ever shifting script that makes minimal sense (at least for the first half) but is still somewhat quite compelling.

Adam (Adam Plotch) is a New Yorker living a mundane life. He's just split-up with his girlfriend and is looking for a new roommate. Into the picture comes Lily (Talia Rubel), a seemingly French woman who proceeds to play verbal mind games with him before leaving the picture and leaving Adam with lustful thoughts.

Things get even more bizarre when he meets up with Lily again in a graveyard and they have a brief make-out session. But that's nothing compared to what happens upon one of Adam's frequent visits to his mother when it turns out Lily is actually his sister, who was thought dead in an accident ten years prior but was really just in a coma.

From here we're led on a twisted journey into the heart of dysfunction and sexual depravity as Adam and Lily not only live together, but also start to love together. Coyula tackles the incest angle with starkness staging a moment involving building tension when the two characters are eating fast food that ends with a quite unsettling almost rape. There's no punches held back here and while the script seems to be trying for way too much, it all ends on a down note (that contains a quite effective "shock" moment) and is still one of the more interesting indie movies to come down the pipe in recent memory.

Not at all what expected, Red Cockroaches sketchily tries to add in some paranoid sci-fi angles by having scenes of flying cars, ads for the ominous DNA 21 company, and at one point having a strange, red insect being smashed out from within a human tooth. But what this really is is a twisted psychological drama.

Leads Plotch and Rubel do extremely well turning in performances that are above average for the budget level and Coyula's off-kilter filmmaking will certainly keep you interested. While a bit more coherence could have helped and most of the sci-fi leanings could have been eliminated this David Lynch inspired effort is certainly does its job in keeping you interested all the way through.

Visit Heretic Films for more info. (Chris Hartley, 9/26/05)

Directed By: Miguel Coyula.
Written By: Miguel Coyula.

Starring: Adam Plotch, Talia Rubel, Diane Spodarek, Jeff Pucillo.

Picture Ratio: Full Frame.

Picture Quality: Shot on digital the transfer here looks pretty nice and crisp for the most part with solid colours and no print flaws. There is a bit of shimmering and fuzziness once and a while, but it still looks good.

Extras: Heretic has put a good selection of extras on this disc as we get a trailer, bio for Coyula, 3 deleted scenes (and outtakes), storyboards, Coyula's 1997 short film Valvula De Luz (translates to Light Valve) that runs 48 minutes, a making of featurette which is bascially Coyula talking about the movie, and listenable commentary track with Coyula, Plotch, and Pucillo. Probably Heretic best DVD so far in this department.