Overview: Candy Apple (2015) is an enticingly dark comedy about a father and son consumed by New York’s undercurrents of vice and desperation.

Blu-ray Verdict: Using the director’s biological father and true stories strung together in a fictional narrative, CANDY APPLE follows Texas Trash as he struggles to get sober while his son Bobby attempts to launch a career in filmmaking.

Meanwhile Trash has all but abandoned landing a job or reigniting his band as planned, and has fallen at the heels of local eccentric, Roxy. With the help of hallucinogens, the two embark on regular adventures through New York and other worlds.

When Bobby hears of Trash’s relapse and near fatal overdose, his confidence and belief in his father is broken. As the cast’s relationships weaken, CANDY APPLE ends where it begins, with the father and son struggling to balance desire with reality but never getting it right.

Knowing that the director, Dean Dempsey came up with the idea for this movie on a whim and decided just as quickly to make a film with only non-actors in it, makes the watching experience all that more interesting.

Simply put, you have got people playing themselves in a narrative with the only one having done any acting being the guy who eats cereal off of a character’s chest! The rest are bums the director met on the street or people he met in a bar. And lest we forget that the guy playing his character’s father is actually his very own father (yes, the one with tattoos all over his neck and face, a hook for an arm and a prosthesis for a leg!)

With post, the film cost around $100,000 to make. They had about 15 people on the crew, and they shot it with Red Epic cameras. It was financed through Wendigo Productions in New York where the CEO is a friend and they wanted to help make a film project.

With films like this, ones without a sizable budget compared to Hollywood and they never-ending mega bucks, Candy Apple clearly shows that you do not need bags and bags of money to make a compelling visual watch.

So don’t focus on the money. Just do it. Write the script, get your friends together and just do it. But get the best audio you can get. As long you have good audio, you won’t lose the interest of your audience. Hence why Candy Apple is a real gem of a low budget film, and one I highly recommend to all admirers of the visual art form.

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