NOBODY CAN COOL

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

As titles go, Nobody Can Cool is pretty meaningless: it appears nowhere in the dialogue (which is frankly so basic that the DVD extras even include a drinking game where you take a shot every time someone says "shut up" or "f*** you") and it's not as if anyone is that hot or needs to calm down that much to begin with. Staying true to the first lesson of B-Movie Making 101 - don't film what you can't afford - the movie has just six characters, one car, one house and some fake blood and prosthetics, and it wisely doesn't try and overreach its meagre resources.

Made (or at least copyrighted) back in 2012 but only now surfacing in the UK, this is a long way from essential, but it does have a few pleasingly weird moments. Nobody Can Cool pits two contrasting couples against each other in a confined space: Susan (Catherine Annette) and David (David Atlas) are on their way to a friend's remote cabin for a romantic break. But when they get to the front door they find Len (Nick Principe, who sometimes seems to be having the most fun giving us his very Best Acting) and the heavily pregnant Gigi (Nikki Bohm) already there. They're supposedly hardened criminals, though rather than doing the simple thing and killing the newcomers/witnesses (which they'd presumably have to do anyway) and stealing their car, they invite them in....

Sadly, none of the four seem to be thinking clearly: Len ties our heroine up with easily cuttable rope next to the knife drawer; David and Susan have not one but three golden, nay diamond-encrusted, opportunities to leg it and botch all of them - and while it's always fairly obvious that it's going to end up with the good guys descending to the villains' level in order to survive, it's only when a third master criminal turns up that the bullets finally start to fly. Before that everyone's tying each other up as hostages, as if Len and Gigi are eventually going to let them go, and tables are turned with ridiculous ease.

Shot on the very, very cheap (check the on-screen font for the credits), the end result isn't great by any stretch, but it's never actively boring and occasionally it gets agreeably silly - it includes one of the most badly timed marriage proposals ever, as well as an entirely unnecessary toilet moment; Len models a horrible yellow Hawaiian shirt throughout and Susan spends the second half of the movie running around in a scarlet onesie. But if nothing else it avoids any suggestion of the sort of gloating sexual violence that sometimes seems inevitable in trashy B-thrillers. That might be down to having women in charge: writer/director/producer Dpyx is actually a duo, Marcy Boyle and Rachel Holzman, neither of whom have their own IMDb pages, and they only have this one to their name so far as a gestalt partnership.

**