2009 mindfuck
Bad Movie Rating: 5/5 (Josh: 4/5; Mark: 4/5; Johnny: 4/5; Samantha: 5/5)
Rating: 1/20
Plot: I really have no fucking clue.
According to imdb, this had a budget of 5 million dollars. Further (quick and lazy) research shows that the all but 40,000 dollars of that was spent on special effects. If you ever watch this movie and see what those special effects involve, that number is going to make you laugh and laugh.
This is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, but it’s such a unique movie watching experience, that I can’t help but give it a Bad Movie Rating of 5/5. For most people, it’s going to be a test of endurance, however. The entire movie completely baffled me. I’m baffled about the frequent shots of ceiling fans and chairs. I’m baffled by those computer graphic effects. I’m baffled about any story that kept trying to poke its head up through all of this nonsense. I’m baffled by that hideous poster up there. I’m even baffled by the title of the movie. After Last Season? What’s that even mean?
This feels a lot like the type of movie aliens would make if they saw a Neil Breen movie and thought it was the best representation of Earth entertainment and then decided to make a movie of their own. Or maybe it feels like a movie that somebody who has never seen a movie but has had the medium described to him by somebody else who has never seen a movie would make. Or it’s like the game Telestrations that I have to play at BMC member Fred’s house sometimes, a game that’s like Telephone but with the drawing of penises. It’s like this movie was made by somebody. Then, somebody else saw it and wrote down a brief synopsis. Then, somebody read that synopsis and made the movie again. Then, somebody saw that and wrote down a synopsis. Then, somebody else made the movie again. And so on until the “movie” is a big incoherent mess that nobody would want to look at and nobody can hear very well anyway.
I think my favorite thing about this are the shots of random things. As I’ve said, nothing really makes sense in this movie, but the frequent shots of chairs, ceiling fans, and arrows on walls were especially perplexing. Why, you’re moved to ask, are the makers of this going to great efforts to make a room in Grandma’s house look like a hospital room by covering up the border at the top of the pink walls with pieces of paper and building an elaborate MRI machine and then drawing the viewers’ attention to the fact that the room has a ceiling fan? What do the arrows mean? Are empty chairs some kind of symbol?
Who is Mark Region, and why did he think he could make a movie? He wrote, produced, and directed this, and he hasn’t done anything in the 8 years since. Did he manage to say every single thing he wanted to say as an artist with this?
I can’t shake these special effects from my subconscious. I’ve dreamed about the CGI sequences that were supposed to be some sort of sci-fi telepathy. A lot of the imagery was abstract, like an antiquated screensaver for a typewriter in the 1940s. And then sometimes, it looked like this:
What the hell? It’s lucky that nobody is seeing this movie because this is the kind of thing that could set animation back 100 years or so. And since a lot of that CGI stuff has no sound accompaniment, it takes on an even eerier quality, like a low-budget nightmare. The big action sequence features an invisible slasher chasing two characters who might be the main characters around the director’s grandmother’s garage while pushing aside office chairs and empty crates. It unfolds so slowly that I actually thought I’d dozed off at one point and had my untalented subconscious awkwardly try to finish the movie for me.
I just don’t know. Usually, I find it easier to write poorly about bad movies than to write poorly about good ones, but I don’t really know what to say about this.
This movie has a twist. I hope I haven’t spoiled it for anybody rushing out to see this atrocity.
