The vigilante film was at its heights as a genre a half century ago with ugly crowd-pleasers like the Charles Bronson franchise “Death Wish.” But it can be traced back to the silent era and even, some say “The Birth of a Nation” (if we can square the KKK as a vigilante squad, a super racist one).
The opioid crisis has been used as a justification for all manner of official excess, from militarization of small town forces to sanctions against neighboring countries for supposedly allowing drug flow over the border (from Canada?).
Frustration about the rise of fentanyl in America — particularly among rural white folks (people never seemed so riled about crack deaths in black communities years ago) — has led to feelings of retribution that bypass law and order solutions. So it’s no surprise there’s a film like “Shooting Heroin” in which townspeople at their wit’s end band together to do everything from unlawful search and seizure to shaming town pharmacists to arson and murder.
“Shooting Heroin” is a pretty bad title for it; “Shooting Heroin Dealers” is clearly what they mean. The dark action drama from Spencer T. Folmar and his Hard Faith productions is from 2019. I was likely sent it for review because I had recently reviewed his other film from rural Pennsylvania (that also featured Cathy Moriarty of “Raging Bull”), “Saint Nick of Bethlehem.”
This one too, is shot in a town so small (shot in and around Clearfield, Pa.), its one sheriff (Garry Pastor) can’t keep up with the rising rate of local ODs. Alan Powell (of TV’s “Quantico”) stars as a single dad who can’t take it anymore when his kid sister dies. He teams with a mother who’s lost two sons (a fully middle-aged Sherilyn Fenn from “Twin Peaks”) and a frustrated prison guard (Lawrence Hilton Jacobs, whose breakout role was as Boom Boom Washington in “Welcome Back Kotter” a half century ago, but more ironically, was one of the muggers in the first “Death Wish”). Together, they are deputized to create their own kind of police state — a kind of precursor, really, to today’s mania for arrest and deportation.
The other recognizable name in “Shooting Heroin” is Nicholas Turturro of “Blue Bloods” and “NYPD Blue” as a not-too-convincing preacher in town. The idea of Hard Faith productions is to bring Christian themes based on gritty reality. Which means you’ll hear fuck a lot more than you would in supposedly inspirational films.
But the inspiration here is not to godliness, necessarily, but to take law into your own hands. Along the way, everybody gets to chew up the scenery a bit, from Moriarty interrupting a funeral, to Fenn. Only in the end is there an unconvincing turn where we learn our enemy is our brother, a sentiment that may be coming too late. We’ve already bought the guns.
And while the film reminds us that while personal stories of horror given at high school assemblies remain ever-ineffective, so is mob rule, despite occasional contemporary evidence to the contrary.
“Shooting Heroin” is available on iTunes, Amazon, Google, Vudu, Sony PSN and FandangoNOW.