Chris Fritz's Blog - Posts Tagged "career"

This post is about a movie called Run Hide Fight. This movie is controversial in a million different ways and unfortunately it tangentially involves me. The plot and premise of this film is very simple. It’s basically die hard in a school. Shooters attack a small town American high school and it’s up to one heroic student named Zoe to stop them and save the day. Seems pretty simple enough. A movie like that can be controversial for its dramatization of school shootings. A real life tragedy that has happened quite a lot in America. With all that in mind I’ve watched the movie so you don’t have to so review it. This movie was very hard to watch. Not only because I pirated it but because the violence in the movie is very graphic so it’s not something to watch with the kids. It’s hard to watch in the same way that Schindler’s list or American history X are hard to watch. Unlike those movies Run Hide Fight is not good. It spends most of its run time seesawing from graphic violence to cringey edge lord humor that makes the whole thing more awkward then it needs to be. There are four students in this story that do all the shooting and play the part of the villains. They consist of a big dude with a shaved head who exhibits symptoms of schizophrenia, a suicide girl who dresses like she robbed a hot topic and puts on flawless make up for committing acts of terrorism, a dorky kid with frizzy hair who admits he’s been bullied and that’s his reason for shooting everyone, and their fearless leader who is a teenage copy and paste of the joker and wants to shoot everybody so he can get likes on social media. Now the hero of our story Zoe is actually a pretty decent character. The only problem I have with her is that she constantly talks to hallucinations of her mother who died from cancer. Mourning a loved one is a serious thing but this movie acts like the fact that this girl is going through the mourning process makes her emotionally dead inside and that somehow this gives her the emotional fortitude that she needs to kill the bad teenagers that are shooting up her school. Personally there are times when I can’t stop laughing about how dumb and awkward this movie is but I don’t think most people who watch this will laugh as much as me.

Now that we’ve talked about that there is even more controversy surrounding this movie. Mostly focusing on its production and release. It was make by a company in Dallas Texas called Cinestate it focuses mostly on making right wing or conservative movies targeted at right wing audiences. The company faced accusations of abusing its employees with long hours and hazardous work environments. This movie’s production also saw some cases of animal cruelty and one of the co-producers of this film named Adam Donaghey was arrested in April 2020 for the sexual assault of an underage girl. So there’s not a lot to be happy about here. Critics absolutely hate this movie. It has bad scores on rotten tomatoes and Meta critic. It premiered at an Italian film festival in 2020 after its film festival run it didn’t get picked up by major distributors. That is until earlier this year it got a deal to be distributed by a site called the Daily Wire. For those of you who don’t know the Daily Wire is a conservative propaganda site founded and run by a Mr. Ben Shapiro. They’ve promoted this film as a conservative right right wing movie for conservative right wing Americans. Now personally I believe the daily wire and Mr. Shapiro are a danger to society but I don’t think this movie is a danger to society. I also don’t really believe this movie fits in well with the right wing conservative media agenda.

So where do I fit in with all of this? I have met the man who wrote and directed this movie and I’m currently friends with him on facebook. His name is Kyle Rankin and I actually worked for the guy for a brief moment on his previous film called the Witch Files. A really great watch if you like found footage movies and magic. So I’m not sure how exactly how to feel about this. Maybe the film industry makes strange allies of the most unlikely of people. Maybe I don’t know Kyle as well as I thought and he is just more than happy to make crap and be a fertilizer salesman. So who knows maybe Kyle Rankin and Ben Shapiro would disagree on a lot of things or maybe I and Kyle Rankin would disagree on more things. Truth be told I’m kind of pissed off. I hate Shapiro’s guts and now on a professional level I’m one degree away from him. Woe is me, woe is me. If some resolution to this ever dawns on me I’ll tell you guys about it. Just know that this situation is messy and life is messy as well. I’m not done talking about this and sometime soon I’ll post part two of this professional snafu and maybe I’ll find some more answers.

Thanks guys