2.9?!??!?!

A 6? Seriously, are you kidding? I respect other people's opinions but I'm just astonished that anybody could actually think that highly of this. I'm even more astonished to hear that this thing had a theatrical release anywhere. It was ugly enough looking on an old 22" TV, but on the big screen it must have been headache-inducing to the point of utter torture.

I don't think it's intended to capture any particular mood of what was going on in Eastern Europe at the time. I think the sole reason it's set there is because it's cheap to film there, like with so many other American B-movies. The "film" showed absolutely nothing about Eastern European society at the time. There may have been rampant crime and drug use in Eastern Europe at that time, as I know many countries in that area faced massive social and economic issues during the transformation from the old communist systems to market economies. However, what on earth does this do to capture that? How on earth can you say that throwing a bunch of washed up American actors into some run down warehouse locations does a "nice job of capturing that time and place"? All of the actors and characters were American except for Ivana Milicevic and Mario Van Peebles terrible French accent. The same story could have been told anywhere where there's rampant social issues and crime. It could have been set in the Bronx with no changes except location and actually been better for it, as all the American characters wouldn't seem so ridiculously out of place. Would a film in set in South Africa during apartheid where the Afrikaners were replaced with Inuit people be accepted as a credible job of capturing that place and era? No, I don't think it would. Sorry, but the claim that it does a "nice job of capturing that time and place" just doesn't cut it.

Furthermore, I've been to Eastern Europe several times. Granted, I haven't been to Bulgaria or Czech Republic where this was filmed, but I have been to Ukraine, Russia and Poland, and I have never heard of this being shown on TV, never seen it for sale on DVD or VHS. Yes, I do have an interest of looking for b-movies abroad and have noticed many terrible American ones, but never this. I'm sure I would have noticed it, because it's always topped my list of worst movies ever made. So please forgive me for being skeptical of it having such a huge cult following in Eastern Europe.

Also, even if it DID manage to do a decent job of capturing a particular place and time (which it didn't), it would still have failed epically due to the fact that it's a terribly disjointed mess where most scenes are long drawn out nothingness with little actual dialog and no coherent continuity between each other, the editing and camera angles are terrible (check the shootout where it's impossible to see who's shooting who, for example) and the filters are incredibly ugly, distracting and again make it difficult to actually determine what's on screen.