Homeless artist Mickey Lewis (Steve Man, EXILES IN PARADISE) literally gets into a "cart accident" with sultry Katrina (Katherine Randolph, BLACK OPS) who takes an interest in his portfolio and offers him a job painting her home in exchange for food and lodging while her possessive husband Arthur (Steven Bauer, SCARFACE) is away. Things quickly heat up between the two and she plants in his head the idea of how they could be together despite the pre-nup that Arthur had her sign. One day, Mickey is apparently drugged by Katrina and he wakes to find her "gay friend" Ryan (Stephen W. Williams, CORPSES) ransacking the house and making off with Arthur's priceless Van Gogh painting to sell it to an unscrupulous art collector (Chriss Anglin, DEAD MEN WALKING). Mickey tails him and ends up in a gunfight in which he is the only survivor. He takes the briefcase with Ryan's $5 million payoff and leave the painting, planning to let it be recovered by the authorities for Arthur while he and Katrina make off with the money, but Katrina has already been planning to cross him; however, Mickey has already double-crossed her, and has a further triple-cross in mind. Katrina gets her hands on his gun and a struggle ends up with her dead from a blow to the skull. Mickey dumps her in the trunk of her car and drives out to the desert to bury her. He makes a stop at an auto garage where he meets attendant/former magician Willy (Robert Donavan, NIGHTMARE MAN), diner owner/cabaret singer Belle (producer Esther Goodstein, SICKLE), and nymphomaniacal loon Heather (Dana Fares, MUSTANG SALLY). Mickey drives further into the desert to bury Katrina only to discover that her body has disappeared from the trunk. He doubles back and takes a room in the adjoining motel run by warden-like Jimmy (James Russo, COLD HEAVEN) and is plunged further into a David Lynch-ian hallucinogenic journey that also invovles Belle's axe-happy ex Vincent (Robert Davi, LICENSE TO KILL), psychic/madam Delphia (Jennifer Pennington, BEYOND THE SILENCE) and flexible, psychotic prostitutes Heather and Lizzy Dark (Kika Perez, LATIN KINGZ).

What looks from the cover like a generic DTV action flick and starts out like a nineties DTV pseudo-noir erotic thriller (in which the traditional film noir story of the first thirty minutes would have been stretched out to ninety minutes with dissolve-heavy sex scenes) morphs into a homage of various classic film noir (most notably Samuel Fuller's SHOCK CORRIDOR) by way of David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY. Derivative as it is, 1 IN THE GUN (or ONE IN THE GUN as it appears on the onscreen title) is well-acted, mostly well-shot (a couple bland-DV-look daytime exteriors probably could have used some digital recoloring), humorous, and diverting effort (although the script is a bit too calculated where it could have been more ambiguous to be quite the "mindfuck" that the filmmakers suggest the film should be labeled). Man (who also produced under his real name Steven Mansueto) has a bit of a Jeff Fahey look (back in the nineties when Fahey was starring in such DTV thrillers), but mostly holds his own, and Randolph makes a fine femme fatale. Bauer could have used some better dialogue, but Davi, Russo, and the lesser-known (though equally prolific in the DTV genre) Donavan are given good material and seem less like they are slumming than in other DTV work. Writer/director Rolfe Kanefsky - son of film editor Victor Kanefsky (GANJA & HESS) - has worked prolifically in made-for-cable and DTV erotica. Having seen only his debut THERE'S NOTHING OUT THERE - a horror comedy with recursive elements that anticipated SCREAM - and the more recent, slicker yet ordinary NIGHTMARE MAN (an entry in one of the cycles of LionsGate's "8 Films to Die For"), ONE IN THE GUN is the most mature and satisfying of the three works.