Portland filmmaker Chel White has been churning out shorts, music videos and more since 1985, so his first feature, “Bucksville,” would be entitled to the closing slot at the 38th Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival on pedigree alone. Fortunately, it also happens to be an ambitious, handsomely mounted and suspenseful experience in its own right.

 
In a small, rural Oregon town, a young man with the odd name of Presley French serves hesitantly as part of a vigilante militia that takes out under-punished crooks on behalf of the mysterious Patron (Tom Berenger, one of the film’s producers). They even have a logo. Presley wants out, imagining a new life for himself in the German Alps with a beautiful fraulein (Storm Large cameo alert!). But neither his hard-nosed uncle, who leads the group, nor the town sheriff will hear of him “betraying his covenant with the lodge.” (They talk like that.)

 
When the Patron ups the ante by providing the group with the opportunity to take out a Bernie Madoff-esque scam artist, things go from bad to worse, and Presley finds out who’s on his side and who isn’t. Even if the premise seems a bit unlikely, the story hums along with enough energy and tension that it hardly matters. The cast, especially Ted Rooney as Presley’s evil uncle, is solid, and Marc Greenfield’s cinematography is as crisp as autumn air.

the_catechism_cataclysm_bucksv.html