Producer: Bob Millar  

An archetypal southern trailer park in the middle of nowhere (in other words trailer-trash limbo) is the world of Barbecue... a love story, a stylish debut feature from Vancouver's Stacy Kirk. Barbecue is a sweet, dark and tender tale of obsession, compulsion, and one man's impulse to follow and devour the object of his desire. While nominally set in the southern US, Barbecue can perhaps be placed in the fictive terra incognita oft-travelled by the Cohen brothers.  

Lucky Striche (Peter Flemming) is an unlucky man. An exterminator by trade, Lucky's insatiable desires for slow-cooked meat and sweet women are his dual Achilles' heels. He's a man trapped in a vicious cycle of attraction, pleasure, pain, betrayal and dissatisfaction, despite his best efforts to fight his compulsions.  

Lucky is far too generous and easy-going for his own good, particularly with his seriously compulsive mother, Miss Kitty (played with great relish by the seriously inimitable Vancouver actor Babz Chula). Miss Kitty's high-rolling habits have got her in a bit too deep with one of the local entrepreneurs at the track, so she makes a wager of her debt load with a white knight - the man who owns her trailer park, Otis Earl (Earl Pastko).  

The plot thickens further when Barbecue Palace hostess, and exceptional barbecue cook, Sas, (Deanna Milligan) decides to leave her abusive relationship and asks her uncle, Otis Earl, to take her in until things settle down for her on the home front. Lucky soon finds himself embroiled in a love triangle where desire speaks to him in a voice he cannot ignore.  

Writer/director Stacy Kirk clearly has genuine affection for the lovable losers and unhappy misfits who people the dead-end world she's created. Great casting provides for wonderful on-screen chemistries, while low-light photography, claustrophobic interiors, and languorous pacing combine to give 'Barbecue ... A Love Story' a charming and entirely appropriate low-budget aesthetic. 

John Dippong