Fighting Words

" Fighting Words"

"As Reported by Dollyforme"

The super hot actress Tara D’Agostino stars in the kinda crappy DVD rental flick Fighting Words. Fighting Words is Tara D’Agostino's first lead in a feature film and she does take all of her clothes in this movie. Nice! She plays an HIV positive gal (does this suck or what) in this direct to DVD movie.

The plot of Fighting Words is Jake (Jeff Steans) is a scruffy regular at the local poetry slam open mic night. When he's not working out his aggression on stage, he's romancing Marni (Tara D'Agostino). Only it turns out Marni has HIV, and Jake decides winning the local $25,000 spoken word competition would go a long way toward helping them out in her fight and, you know, in providing food and stuff.

Jake can't win a five-man competition against a guy who raps about sex but somehow he's favored to be a big contender in the slam, though the reigning contender, David Settles (C. Thomas Howell), will be tough to beat. Settles is however, a cheater: He's got a secret stash of awesome poetry to use, and he's going to goad Jake into going 'off book' to respond to it.

The movie is obviously very low budget, but Tara’s beauty is hard to ignore. The movie leaves no poetry cliche unturned, right down to Howell's soul patch and the carefully crumpled pieces of paper which contestants read from. This all comes to us courtesy of E. Paul Edwards, a writer for Knight Rider, 21 Jump Street, and Baywatch Nights, here making his theatrical and directorial debut.

The movie is of course completely ridiculous. Not only is the setup trite and hackneyed, the finale is ludicrous. Jake knows that Howell's Settles is cheating -- as do others in the room -- but instead of simply pointing this out to the judges, he improvises a weak 'response' poem about plagiarism. And this actually turns out to be Settles' big plan! Then there's the very premise of the $25,000 poetry slam, which is held in a dingy L.A. bar and involves only a handful of competitors. The large-scale poetry slam events, in reality involve regional teams of poets with a cash price of usually $2,000.

The good news about the movies is – the poetry in Fighting Words is actually pretty good, the best being a bit from Howell about finding the point, walking miles away, where he can no longer see a light at nighttime. So between a hot woman star and some great poetry you can find a lot to like in this low budget direct to DVD movie.