Swelter
starring Lennie James, Catalino Sandino Moreno, Grant Bowler, Josh Henderson, Freya Tingley, Arie Verveen, Daniele Favilli, Alan Simpson, Alfred Molina and Jean-Claud Van Damme
written and directed by Keith Parmer
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
A crew of thieves robs a Las Vegas casino of ten million dollars. It’s a brilliant, professional job. But they didn’t count on getting caught, which is what happened. Everyone got sent up the river for ten years. All but one. One of the crew, Pike, is wounded by a gunshot wound to the head, suffers amnesia, and ends up in a small rural town of Baker where he is taken in by the locals - eccentric people who have a tendency to harbor a lot of secrets in their isolated community. Eventually Cole, now calling himself Bishop, is elected sheriff. He has an attractive reputation of a dark past which no one understands, least of all himself due to his chronic amnesia. But after their release, wrongly thinking that their wounded mate has run off with their ill-gotten booty, Bishop’s former crew come looking for him at the height of a terrible heat wave. They’re a vicious bunch of desperados and the extreme weather aggravates their tendency to use extreme violence.