AllMovie

Jon Jost pulled out all the stops for the last film he made before relocating to Europe in the mid-'90s. Narrated in alternating monologues by the two leads and done up in garish, clashing colors, Frameup employs a whole arsenal of low-budget tricks, from stop-motion animation to optical printing effects to documentary sequences, to whip up a raunchy skewering of the Bonnie and Clyde couple-on-the-run movie genre. In contrast to the more serious, politically committed films that made Jost's reputation, Frameup offers virtually nothing in terms of social commentary, and as a result many of his admirers dismissed it as a tasteless, self-indulgent lark. But as a tasteless, self-indulgent lark it succeeds wildly. Jost's enjoyably crude, scabrous sense of humor, which seemed to disappear after his 1977 debut feature Last Chants for a Slow Dance, bursts through every scene of Frameup. The jokes range from the subtle (Beth-Ann at one point recounts her high school counselor advising her that "it wouldn't be a good idea to kill myself...just yet") to the pornographic (one visual pun literally revolves around a tattoo on Ricky-Lee's penis). Almost all of them hit the mark, much to the credit of stars Nancy Carlin and Howard Swain, whose good sportsmanship and deadpan, partially improvised performances mesh perfectly with Jost's comedic sensibility. Ironically, one year later Oliver Stone released Natural Born Killers, inspiring a whole new batch of exactly the kind of Bonnie and Clyde knockoffs that Frameup spoofed so well.