Review of Crank: High Voltage (2009) by Chads — 18 Apr 2009

Mindless violence and mindless sex fill the screen at a breakneck pace in "Crank: High Voltage", a post-modernist exercise in degenerate excess that can best be described as a sort of "Grindhouse for Dummies".

Typical of the film's juvenile sensibilities, The Cramps' classic three-chord stomper "Bikini Girls with Machine Guns" gets an update by having topless exotic dancers shoot up a gentleman's club.

At one point, a stripper leaks blood, and maybe, saline, after she takes a bullet in the chest. "Crank: High Voltage" is brutal, reprehensibly racist and misogynistic, but fun in a gross, politically incorrect way.

This sequel to "Crank" is, quite literally, a filmic mash note to the post-modernist master of immoral fun himself. In another sense, the film also works as an unofficial sequel to "Boogie Nights".

At a race track, Chev Chelios(Jason Stratham) has public sex in a variety of positions with Eve(Amy Smart) that recalls porn star Nina Hartley's driveway escapades in the Paul Thomas Anderson classic.

"Boogie Nights" documented the moment that the adult film industry made the transition from celluloid to videotape. In "Crank: High Voltage", Chelios encounters a picket line of striking "actors", who are reacting to another seismic shift in their industry.

Later on, as aforementioned, Chev and Eve provide some sideshow entertainment for a house full of racehourse enthusiasts in what seems like an extended show of gratuitous sex. The outdoor boinking actually illuminates on how amateur sex videos are winning the hearts and groins of porn aficionados over the industry-sanctioned product, which spawned alternative "movie stars" such as the late Marilyn Chambers and the aging Jenna Jameson.

People prefer non-professionals because the sex looks more "real", less fake. Quite pointedly, Chev Chelios has no heart.