Try as you might, I guarantee you you’ll never find another movie like “Ticked off Trannies with Knives” ever again. You’ve seen what men can do when they’re out for revenge, you’ve seen what women can do when they’re out for revenge, but never have you seen a movie centered on transsexuals who have had enough gay bashing and abuse and decide to band together to wreak havoc on their tormentors. And for that, Israel Luna’s horror thriller gets a bonafide recommendation mainly for his willingness to expose folks to the sub-genre now defined as transploitation where a group of tormented transsexuals and drag queens band together with their own phallic symbols to mutilate anyone and anything that gets in their way and makes their lives pure misery.
While you can definitely identify this as exploitation, this doesn’t make light of the plight of transsexuals and Luna does his best to depict these characters as human even when they’re being maniacal and devious. With the right amount of camp and grindhouse tailoring, Israel Luna creates what will be a cult camp classic that exploits the culture it spotlights while also depicting characters of a respectable loyalty and morality that make them sympathetic protagonists. Meanwhile he is never afraid to have fun with the premise often staging some rather comical exchanges between characters and features a really campy journey of the surviving characters who gain empowerment when meeting with an ancient Martial Arts master who teaches them how to be warrior. Clearly Luna’s influences with lie with Tarantino as he adds a transgender twist to elements of the plot that resemble “Kill Bill Vol. 2,” and “Pulp Fiction.”
With often engrossing dialogue, Luna’s characterization is rich and often times interesting and this is helped by the strong performances from its cast. Krystal Summers is very good as the heroine Bubbles who is kidnapped and raped by a homophobic man who returns to torment her and finish the job after he and his friends lure her and her two other girlfriends to a warehouse. Luna makes good on his promise of this being exploitation as the beating sequences are often horrific and offers up a slight edge with the observation that what’s happening before our eyes is not only a sex crime but a hate crime. On the flipside he never takes the story too seriously so there’s not a preach fest, only a revenge thriller. Kelexis Davenport is the stand out as the matriarchal transgendered friend Pinky who watches over her friends and is never afraid to get her fingers dirty engaging in a really entertaining fight scene.
While I do enjoy Luna’s style, too often he seems reliant on tapping the styles of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to create a faux-grindhouse atmosphere that sometimes isn’t as pleasant or as much of a compliment to the story as Luna thinks it will be. While the grindhouse film scratches and dialogue skips are amusing, more often than not they’re immensely distracting and never quite add to the experience at all. Meanwhile Luna has a difficult time filming action sequences as fight scenes are shaky and hard to focus in on, and Luna resorts to hand held directing that is distracting and not as gritty as Luna seems to think it is. In the end the foot shots, extended dialogue scenes with Luna revolving around the characters, and observations on pop culture are very derivative and it would have been much more interesting if Luna would have showed off his unique style rather than taking from Tarantino’s own.
Meanwhile Luna can never seem to decide the tone of his own film often depicting it as an action movie, then a revenge thriller, then a kung fu movie, then a comedy, and back to a thriller again. Luna seems to want to fit in so many themes that he never focus in on a proper tone and allow the audience to decide if they want to giggle or soak in the severity of this vicious crime. All in all “Ticked off Trannies” is a bit of a karma trip with Luna invoking grindhouse tropes and giving his target audience about the best experience as he can while also sticking to the classic revenge movie formula. As a lover of revenge flicks, and grindhouse, I had a definite good time with “Ticked-Off Trannies” and Luna is a director to watch for. While I would have liked to see Luna display his own style and not crib from Tarantino so much, anyone looking for a revenge thriller that allows the transgender culture some time in the spotlight will want to check out “Ticked-Off Trannies” an entertaining revenge thriller with very good performances, sharp direction, and firm sense of awareness that keeps this a dramatic revenge movie without preaching to the audience.