Dark Streets to Nowhere

Chaz (Gabriel Mann) is a hardworking young club owner in a
sensationalized 1930s noir cityscape, struggling to keep bills paid,
glasses full, and showgirls sexually satisfied. Things aren’t going so
well: Chaz is spending money faster than he’s making it, debtors are
circling, and blackouts periodically plunge his club into evocative
darkness. Chaz gives the impression of being the type of man who can’t
grow a proper mustache, but insists on trying—yet despite his
manifest insipidity, showgirls constantly vie for his attention, a
rivalry that’s settled once and for all with the arrival of Madelaine
(Izabella Miko), a bombshell who quickly becomes the club’s hottest
ticket. Any more plot is hardly worth reciting, but it involves, in no
particular order: sex, betrayal, elaborate showtunes, cocaine,
astronomy, murder, and corruption at the power company. (Whether this
is a deliberate homage to Chinatown, or simple creative
grasping, I won’t venture to guess.) Dark Streets is a labored,
affected noir knock-off that’s crammed unimaginatively with all the
tropes of the genre and not one iota of the glamour or
intrigue—and as a final insult, the film’s dedicated to the blues
musicians of New Orleans who lost their homes in Katrina. C’mon.
Haven’t they suffered enough?