The DVD includes a making-of featurette, Back to Hell, that features interviews from a large portion of the cast, both prominent and supporting, an audio commentary by Cox and Rude and a short tour of the filming locations.
The second film, Searchers 2.0, comes from 2007 when Cox was moving into extremely low-budget filmmaking. Working from another original screenplay, Cox traverses more overtly comic territory with this road picture, following two former child actors, Mel (Del Zamora) and Fred (Ed Pansullo), who are on a quest to exact revenge.
The two meet in a quickly sketched moment of happenstance, and discover that they both worked on the same film as youngsters, where they were terrorized by a domineering screenwriter (Richardson again). They find out he’s screening his latest film in Monument Valley, and the two manage to coax Mel’s distant daughter (Jaclyn Jonet) into giving them a ride there from Los Angeles.
Searchers 2.0 sometimes feels like it’s herking and jerking from one genre to another (and Pansullo’s deliberately obnoxious performance probably has something to do with that), but there’s a lot of inspired satire, beauty and lunacy to be found in the film. It effectively skewers nostalgia for one’s past and the state of filmmaking simultaneously in a series of conversations where Mel and Fred discuss their favorite films, all the while getting key details wrong and conflating true classics with soulless studio garbage. It’s also gorgeously shot by DP Steven Fierberg, whose digital compositions of Monument Valley and the road getting there are quite affecting.
The film ends with a customary bang of surreal craziness from Cox, which does feel a little out of nowhere, but Searchers 2.0 is clearly the product of a filmmaker who’s both smart and rebellious. As a genre mash-up of the western, the road movie and the industry satire, it’s a total success.
The DVD includes a making-of featurette and an audio commentary by Cox, composer Dan Wool and sound designer Richard Beggs.
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