Red Hook Black

Red Hook Black crawls forward by means of stilted conversations and vacuous exchanges.

That Red Hook Black, a strained film about two friends struggling with jobs and family in a bleak, thickly spread economic milieu, is adapted from a play is painfully obvious; that it's never able to transcend its staginess makes it unbearable.

The characters are wearisomely one-dimensional and their situations and motives almost indecipherable due to poor exposition, weirdly pretentious dialogue and amateurish thesping.

Reprinting its entire script would be the only way to properly convey the unintentionally hilarious awfulness of Red Hook Black, which complements its stilted and goofy writing with equally inept performances.