Dead Season (2002)

November 9, 2005

by Nathan Shumate

Written and directed by Ron Ford
Starring
- Randal Malone
- Trish Haight
- Ted Newsom
- Ron Ford
- Wes Deitrick

Those of us with a finger in the microbudget cinema “scene” become so familiar with the names of the “star” directors — Eric Stanze, Tim Ritter, Kevin Lindenmuth, the Polonia brothers — that we forget how little mainstream success these directors enjoy. Unlike some other commercial creative pursuits, such as comic books or alternative music, microbudget filmmaking isn’t a “farm league” for bigger and better things. There simply isn’t any crossover to speak of between indie genre moviemaking and Hollywood, even “big-budget” direct-to-DVD B-movies.

“But what about Ron Ford?” is the expected rejoinder from those in this community.

And the fact that most readers won’t know who Ron Ford, the “microbudget success story,” is is itself its own best commentary. Ford is one of the old guard who first caught some attention in the mid-’90s (the “old guard” for microbudget cinema really isn’t that old). He’s done both collaborative and solo shot-on-video features, some of which, like Hollywood Mortuary (1998), have a very good reputation. But to cite him as an example of crossover success, proponents will point to his having been tapped to direct the eleventh installment of the direct-to-video Witchcraft franchise in 2000; given the standard reduction of budget with each installment of such a franchise, I think you can guess what resources Ford had to work with by the time #11 came around. And as I write this, Ford has just finished directing Tiki, a very Charles Band-esque horror flick, for producer Fred Olen Ray. (Ray’s own career gives a good measure of the pulse of B-movies in general. Two decades ago, he enjoyed respectable budgets and even the occasional theatrical release. Nowadays, he divides his time between directing six- to twelve-day shoots of genre or kiddie flicks on digital video for clients, and directing and producing four-day exploitation flicks on DV for release through his own Retromedia Entertainment.)

Ladies and gentlemen, our hero.

I will admit that, beyond being able to recite the facts of his career, I am not an expert on Ron Ford. Aside from his segments in Lindenmuth’s productions, Dead Season is the first of his features I’ve seen. And generalizing from one production to the whole of his output is fairly risky. But seeing this flick reinforced my theory as to why microbudgeters aren’t co-opted by Hollywood more often. It’s not because of some “glass ceiling,” some snobbery against those who dare to express their creative visions outside the confines of the delineated American movie factory. No, it’s more because the movies that the microbudgeters make just aren’t that good.

(Note: In preparing to write this review, I took a quick look around at some other reviews on the internet, and found that I’m actually the odd man out on this one. Other opinions uniformly range from “hesitantly positive” to “strongly positive.” Does that mean I’m wrong? Come on, you know me better than that; it means that everyone else is.)

So. What gets a B-movie rolling better than anything else? You got it — boobies! Our first scene is a mostly unclothed couple (Mark Shady and Athena Demos), discussing quantum physics and chaos theory as a bizarre form of foreplay. Don’t bother paying to much attention to their musings, though, or their names; just about the time they stop using their lips for talking, a knife-wielding somebody bursts in and slashes them up.

Writing the script on the set? Not a good sign.

Fast-forward fifteen years. That killing, along with a string of others in Craven Cove, became the subject of a true crime novel by one Lucas Swan, who hasn’t written a thing since. We find out all of this from the lips of Jenny (Trish Haight), Swan’s number-one fan, who’s talked to him on the internet and is currently hitchhiking her way to Craven’s Cove to meet him in person. The screener cassette I’ve got notes on the back that Haight has had much success in local theatre, and I believe it. Her performance here is very theatrical, very stagy, and very very hammy. Hammy enough that she makes William Shatner look like a model of method-acting restraint.

It’s just after Halloween when Jenny arrives in Craven’s Cove, and Swan’s bed and breakfast has shut down for the “dead season”; she forces herself first upon Clay (director Ford), the mentally-challenged groundskeeper for Swan House, and then Lucas Swan himself (Randal Malone), who obviously doesn’t need a fan, doesn’t want a groupie, and doesn’t harbor any dreams of writing a second book. But Jenny is almost psychotic in her inability to take “No” for an answer, and soons manages to wrangle her way into the house as a non-paying guest.

The house. Jeez louise, the house. The interior of Swan House is decorated with opulent sofas, ornate chandeliers, curlique wallpaper… and on video, the whole thing because a headache-inducing mishmash of overlapping patterns and clashing colors. The only respite from the visual cacophany is Malone as Swan; the thick foundation makeup on his rotund face, his overpainted eyebrows and eyeliner, and his bizarrely-trimmed black hair (a wig, or was he just trying to make it look like one?) make him look like he thought they were shooting a silent film on ’20s film stock. He tries to ham it up as well, but he’s not match for the pure pork production coming from his co-star. And anyway, it’s hard to bluster through a role when a character’s motivations and attitudes remain vague: Is he contemptuous of his fellow man? Hiply ironic? Secretly pining for another chance at literary stardom? Deeply lonely? It never really becomes clear; there are lines in the script, he says them, and if his delivery never really builds up to drawing a well-defined picture of the character, that’s not his problem. Between the actor’s ample physique and the character’s lack of an honest personality, Swan amounts to a singularly uncompelling protagonist.

Yet another man who needs to switch to an electric shaver.

And it just so happens, by fabulous coincidence, that the man that Swan always suspected of being behind the murders fifteen years ago — a boarder at Swan’s bed and breakfast by the name of Sam Risher (Ted Newsom) — decides to choose that very day to show up again. Boy, what are the odds? Even in the contrived world of movies, in which coincidences are employed ad nauseum to start the plot a-plotting, this one is so unlikely that some character really should have remarked on it. (And someone should have remarked on the fact that he also hasn’t visibly aged since, as the brief flashback footage shows.)

After spooking Swan for no real reason (except that’s what serial killers like to do), Risher then peeps on and kills a local girl. When body parts and the machete are found the next morning in the back yard of old challenged Clay, Police Detective Karlen (Wes Deitrick) are quick to proclaim that they’ve got their man, despite the fact that Clay’s a) never harmed a soul, and b) not smart enough to do anything like wipe his prints off the murder weapon. (In fact, as he’s written, Clay’s not smart enough to reside alone in a detached dwelling with its own back yard.)

So now Swan and Jenny have a mission: Prove that lovable Clay didn’t really commit the murder. And catch Risher, who manages (though an awful contrivance) to become an off-season boarder at Swan House. Can’t you just feel the tension?

I give you the next President of the United States!

If you can, you’d better remember it well, because it’s about to bleed away. Not content to tell us a straight-forward thriller, Ford keeps piling plot threads into the script, diluting the plot in six different ways. The police arrange for the dead girl’s boyfriend (Joe Estevez! Man, how bad does your career have to be…) to have a “private session” with suspect Clay; unfortunately, the upshot is that the beating Clay receives awakens his instincts for self-preservation, and he kills the boyfriend and a cop as he escapes. Meanwhile, Risher stages another murder in such a way that he gets a compromising photograph of Swan looking very guilty, so Swan can’t go to the police. So then Swan and Jenny have to decide whether to kill Risher on their own. Oh, and here’s a big secret, thrown in for no good reason: Risher is actually twins, Sam and Benny. That’s supposed to be a surprise reserved for the climax, but the “clues” established early on are about as subtle as a huge winking billboard that reads “HEY THERE ARE ACTUALLY TWO RISHERS SHHH DON’T TELL.”

By the time we get to what should have been the thrilling climax, we’ve also thrown in some bizarre last-minute spiritualism, connected to a once-mentioned-and-long-forgotten plot thread about Swan being able to “get inside” the mind of the killer in his last book. And then, climax having come and gone, the movie keeps on going, as if that late-introduced plot thread were too good to let the credits roll without milking it, to the point that the movie that we end with isn’t much like the movie that we started with.

Well, this should finally put to rest the myth of the “slimming” effect of stripes.

Hey, I make no secret of it; I’m a story-focused kind of reviewer. So when a movie comes along that pretty obviously doesn’t know what story it’s trying to tell, I cut very little slack. Add that to the acting already mentioned, the script (while not abysmal, the dialogue is solidly uninspired), and the lackluster videography, and the end result is a lot of work for very little umph.