• Directed by Jeremy Isbell
• Written by Lewis Leslie
• Starring
  • Lewis Leslie
  • Travis Azbill
  • Jake Goodman
  • Christie Blackwell
  • Shannon Williamson
• Produced by Sam Stone
• Executive produced by Steve Kitchell

Any time a movie with a cautionary title crosses my desk, the temptation to turn it around and offer advice to the filmmakers is just too great to resist. Especially because in this case, the guilty parties seem to have been operating within their own perverse set of boundaries to make as unsatisfying a motion picture as possible. Like Don’t Light Your Set. Or Don’t Write a Script. Or Don’t Edit Sober. Or quite possibly Don’t Bother Giving the Audience Any Reason Whatsoever to Watch.

People this far over on the wrong side of the Goofus/Gallant continuum are lost causes; they have all of creative instinct of a herd of lemmings. Thus, I shall address my own cautionary remarks to any other filmmakers out there, aspiring or established, who seek to better their own craft and learn from the failures of others. And there are enough failures in this one 48-minute feature that if every one taught a lesson, you could end up the toast of Hollywood.

“Looks pretty good for roadkill.”

Don’t Shoot at Night. In real life, darkness can be spooky and unsettling. In a competently made movie, darkness can lend atmosphere and mystery. But if you don’t have the wherewithal to light your shooting locations adequately, the result is a murky, undifferentiated mess that taxes the viewer’s eyeballs, punctuated by scenes that look as if they’re lit by Klieg Lights ‘R’ Us.. I knew I was in for a treat when the opening shot is of a man driving a car at night, and either the spotlight on the camera or a flashlight is aimed in the general direction of his ear.

Said driver — and if his name is ever revealed, it happens so long after I lost interest that it shall remain unknown — drives down a deserted country road until he hits a woman in white standing in the middle of the road. Not surprising; every exterior shot is wrapped in so much billowing mist, there must have been a sale on fog machines. He immediately gets out, picks up her prone (but remarkably undamaged) body, and trots directly into the unlit house beside the road, shouting out for help.

Since there appears to be no one around, he leaves her on the couch and runs back out into the road, where he almost reprises the earlier accident before he manages to stop the oncoming vehicle. The occupants are two guys, Travis and Tom (whose names kind of show up sideways later on), and two girls, Sarah and Sandy (ditto) — and no, the credits don’t reveal who played what role. It takes the first guy a while to get his predicament across to the newcomers, mainly because his idea of communication is to shout, “You gotta help me!” three or four times, but eventually the facts of the accident are conveyed. The men argue, then decide to go into the house to see the roadkill, while the girls whine and stay in the car.

“‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean…’ um… ‘…incarnadine… making the green one red.’ Line!”

Inside the house, the men discover nothing on the sofa. They argue. Listening to the dialogue of this movie is a truly remarkable experience. On the one hand, the delivery is far too stilted to be ad-libbed. On the other, it’s almost inconceivable that lines which so rarely follow from one to the next, or which so rarely sound like the strings of words that would come from the mouth of a for-real person, were composed by someone who had sufficient mental facility to learn to type. Or, as my notes taken during the movie read: “The dialogue sucks all available ass.” Don’t Let a Cretin Write the Screenplay.

The guys decide to return to the car, whereupon they disappear into a time warp for ten minutes. Back at the car, the girls whine and moan about how uncool all this is. Then one of them sees something — perhaps the girl in white — through the window, and immediately they decide to go exploring.

Oh, and apparently there was a third girl — who shall be known as The Blonde — sleeping in the SUV somewhere. No one ever mentioned her before, but she reciprocates by not wondering where the others are when she wakes from her nap; she just gets out and wanders away on her own.

“Snarl! Yip! Grr!”

So that when the guys get back to the car (which is, I should note, currently unattended and not running, but with its lights still on), they can’t find the girls — the first two, at least; they still don’t mention The Blonde — and so decide to go wander off in a random direction to find them.

That’s right. The remainder of the movie is a bunch of stupid people, wandering at random through a house that must be roughly the size of Cleveland. Very rarely, the woman in white shows up and snarls. Slightly more frequently, a fat guy in a black robe appears. He might say something cryptic like, “Don’t turn around” for no discernable reason. Or he might just kill someone so quickly that it’s almost easy to miss it.

If that were all, it’d be bad enough. But no, there are always ways to make a movie worse, and these savants didn’t rest until they found it. If watching a bunch of indistinguishable characters wander around in the dark is almost unwatchable, how would it be if we were shown the scenes all out of order? And not from some “Look at me, I saw Memento once” mindset. No, there’s no structure involved in the way that scenes are presented. They’re simply shown at random. Thus, one of the guys is locked in a closet. Then he takes part in several other scenes with the other guys. Then he escapes from the closet. The Blonde is shown being dragged under a couch by a stuffed animal; next thing we know, she’s wandering around the house again. (Question: How many of you, when wandering through a kitchen in a strange house, will stop and try the faucet just to see if it runs? Congratulations! You have a great future ahead of you in dumb-ass horror flicks!) Mixed in, we start getting scenes of a SECOND blonde girl, with no introduction, also wandering around the house. It isn’t until three-quarters of the way through that she even officially “shows up” — when one of the guys runs out of the house and, yes, stops a vehicle in the road. Don’t Edit With a Food Processor.

WHEN LARPERS ATTACK!

Thus, people get tied by by the black-robed guy. Next scene, they’re wandering around. Other characters get killed; next scene, they’re still wandering around. The last thing a movie like this needs is dream sequences on top of it, but we get them — and they do provide some welcome moments of daylight, and thus intelligible footage. But they make no more sense than the other scenes, and certainly contribute nothing in terms of mood or spookiness. (Watch as one guy reels back in horror when the homeless man in his dream tells him that he’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma! OH NO! NOT TULSA!!! That might mean something if the rest of the story had been set anywhere in particular…)

Eventually, it kinda ends. By which I mean, I think it was supposed to be a shocker ending, with two people getting away and then not really. Except that I had stopped trying to keep track of whether people were dead or not, so I really didn’t care. Seeing the credits start rolling at the 41-minute mark was a blessed relief, but it came too late; at 20 minutes in, I had already vowed to beat the director with a section of rebar.

…And this is what the other three-quarters of the movie looks like.

As with the previous feature I reviewed by this same cadre of short-bus filmmakers, Living Nightmare (2001), it seems that they were going for “surreal” without having any idea what that means. Pointless random stuff of imbecilic characters wandering around is not “surreal.” Throwing scenes out of order for no better reason than that you don’t have any other ideas is not “surreal.” It’s amateurish, it’s boring, and it’s frankly insulting that they would think that I, or any other sentient member of the human race, has absolutely nothing better to do for even less than an hour of my life.

My advice to you: Don’t Bother Watching.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0