(Download Pawn Shop Chronicles) Wayne Kramer’s grubby, obnoxious comic thriller Pawn Shop Chronicles registers as an unfortunate throwback to the plague of dodgy Quentin Tarantino knockoffs that afflicted video-store shelves in the mid-to-late 1990s.(Pawn Shop Chronicles Download) It belongs to an unfortunate subgenre of exploitation movies that aspire to catch the attention of undiscriminating thrill-seekers with a brassy carny spiel promising sex and über-violence, plus the reassuring presence of has-beens and C-listers hoping to make John Travolta-style comebacks.

(Download Pawn Shop Chronicles) Best known as the writer-director of 2003’s The Cooler, a Vegas-set redemption drama that earned Alec Baldwin a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, Kramer wrote and directed one of the more noteworthy and distinctive of these Tarantino knock-offs in 2006’s Running Scared,(Download Pawn Shop Chronicles Movie) which pushed genre sleaze and sensationalism to hallucinatory levels and won a modest cult following in the process. Pawn Shop Chronicles is even more shameless in its appropriation of Tarantino’s B-movie/drive-in aesthetic and the particulars of his filmography, brazenly borrowing central motifs of his work,(Watch Pawn Shop Chronicles Online) such as Elvis iconography, pawn shops, torture, and sexual slavery. The film doesn’t feel like a fresh riff on familiar tropes so much as a bad cover of Pulp Fiction.

(Download Pawn Shop Chronicles) In the framing device that links three equally pointless vignettes, Vincent D’Onofrio plays Alton, a pawn-shop proprietor whose business figures prominently in all three stories, each involving desperate characters on the fringes of society. The first follows a group of meth addicts, including a grunged-up Paul Walker, attempting to rip each other off in counterproductive ways that at times recall a grimy, amphetamine-addled variation on O. Henry’s “The Gift Of The Magi.” Not content to steal just from the best,(Watch Pawn Shop Chronicles Online) Kramer also blatantly rips off Jonas Akerlund’s Spun, an instant cult oddity similarly invested in the Goodfellas-derived cliché that the best way to chronicle late-period drug delirium is to mirror its effects stylistically. Here, he tries to convey coke-related frenzy by creating the impression that the cameramen and editor are ingesting industrial quantities of blow.

(Download Pawn Shop Chronicles) The next vignette elevates the violence to torture-porn/grindhouse levels in the blood-drenched, sexual-violence-permeated tale of newlywed Richard (Matt Dillon), who goes on a crazed quest for vengeance after visiting the pawn shop and spotting a ring he gave to an ex-wife who disappeared mysteriously years earlier. As Johnny, an ominous figure with a dark secret, Elijah Wood joins the coterie of recognizable names and faces jumping at the opportunity to roll around in filth at Kramer’s behest.

Brendan Fraser stars in the film’s third and least sordid vignette as Ricky, a hapless Elvis impersonator whose resemblance to the King goes no further than an unusually twitchy upper lip and a fumbling familiarity with the basics of Presley’s life. He winds up in a trippy small town with strange customs and rituals, acquiring unlikely redemption after turning his life over to a King of a more heavenly variety.

(Download Pawn Shop Chronicles) Pawn Shop Chronicles is just as sleazy and violent as Running Scared, but this time the path of excess leads not to wisdom—or even a cheap good time—but to weariness and exhaustion. By the time it winds to a conclusion, the film seems to have tired itself out, like a toddler who screeches nonsensically for hours, then falls asleep in a fetal ball in the corner.

Pawn Shop Chronicles is comprised of a trio of interconnected shorts that appear to have been inspired by the pivotal scene in Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis's Butch and Ving Rhames's Marsellus stumble into a pawn shop and suddenly find themselves trapped in a horror film. Director Quentin Tarantino has built his career on such tonally jarring transitions, of course, and with Pawn Shop Chronicles, screenwriter Adam Minarovich has let himself run wild in attempting to up the ante on the number of genre switcheroos that an audience will accept in any random 10 minutes of a film's running time. At times, the film resembles an extremely broad and violent episode of My Name Is Earl, only to offer, in other instances, poetic and suggestively transgressive imagery that faintly recalls Alejandro Jodorowsky and Álex de la Iglesia's films.

(Download Pawn Shop Chronicles) Minarovich and director Wayne Kramer seize on the sinister pall that hangs over pawn shops, which obviously profit from others' desperation, and spin a dark comedy of broken American dreams that follows a day in the life of a pawn shop owner (Vincent D'Onofrio) as he inadvertently ruins all of his customers' lives. The first story, which features an unusually game Paul Walker as a meth head who meets a flamboyant end, is the least interesting on paper, but Kramer enlivens the proceedings with purposefully showy aesthetics that invest the tiniest of gestures with a gonzo energy that's reminiscent of a Tex Avery cartoon.

(Download Pawn Shop Chronicles) The remaining tales, however, have a sick-joke grandeur that suggests what might have happened if O. Henry had ever written for EC Comics. The second story is a perverse wowzer that follows a recently married man (Matt Dillon) as he stumbles upon the truth of his first wife's disappearance, which sends him on a surreal journey that eventually leads to the home of a very disturbed individual played by Elijah Wood. The ending, which parodies the suggestion of ownership that's latent in the classic marriage arrangement, has unexpected bite.

(Download Pawn Shop Chronicles) The final story has an awkward opening that's marred by Brendan Fraser's unfunny mugging as an Elvis impersonator, but it builds to a commendably bizarre climax that features an army of recently liberated sex slaves marching into a country fair to a rendition of "Amazing Grace" as their naked bodies are wrapped in American flags. These images are so loaded you can probably locate whatever subtext corresponds to your ideology, but Pawn Shop Chronicles is probably best understood as a self-dare on the part of the filmmakers, who revel in the freedom that a limited theatrical release presumably allows. Kramer thankfully refuses to cloak his excessiveness in hedge-betting self-consciousness and the result is a gratifyingly disreputable B-movie blow out.