when the levee breaks incomplete
When the Levee Breaks was the third and final entry in a trilogy of incomplete spaghetti western-inspired short films created during the chaotic tail end of high school by Dollars & Donuts and Ray Revello’s Machine Gun Funk Productions. Written and directed by Ray, the project stars Donald Flores as the outlaw and features a hilariously miscast Anthony Silva delivering some of the worst acting in Dollars & Donuts history. Silva’s delivery — complete with the bizarre inflections and drawn-out vowels of a 2000s-era California dude — makes every line sound like it has frosted tips.
As the production spiraled out of control, Ray and Daryl's penchant for bizarre ideas took center stage. What should have been pivotal emotional moments were routinely undercut by the group’s “funny” experiments. One infamous scene was shot in a loud, bustling Burger King with no microphones, making Donald’s performance completely inaudible. The framing only added to the absurdity, with a massive Burger King logo dominating the screen, followed by a distracting cameo of Daryl and Ray casually strolling past the window outside. These kinds of amateurish "jokes" became hallmarks of the era, as the crew learned firsthand why Hollywood avoided such strange and self-indulgent choices.
While much of the film remains unedited, key sequences were completed, including a cemetery showdown ripped straight from Sergio Leone, and a montage of Ray's character hunting Donald door-to-door. This montage is a fever dream of Dollars & Donuts inside jokes, featuring a wanted poster drawn by Daryl to resemble their friend Dom Banks (nicknamed because he looked like a warped version of Tom Hanks) and an appearance by Joshua Nair, an old friend who only rarely popped up in Dollars & Donuts productions. Ray also stumbles across Daryl reprising his blood-soaked character from The Death Epic, only this time with a towel over his head to hide the lack of gore, in a bizarre attempt at continuity between films that hadn’t even been completed. Daryl is also seen holding Walker, his family’s great dane and the eventual mascot of Dollars & Donuts, marking one of the dog’s earliest on-screen appearances.
Though the film remains unfinished, it captures a time when experimentation and learning the craft outweighed coherence or professionalism — less a cinematic achievement and more a time capsule of youthful ambition.