• Directed by Leo Evans
• Written by Kevin Ponder and Jeremy Isbell
• Starring
  • Kevin Ponder
  • Jeremy Isbell
  • Jamie Morrow
  • Lisa Noll
  • Jeb Magruder
• Produced by Kevin Ponder and Jeb Magruder
• Executive produced by Jeremy Isbell

First up, something I rarely do. I want you to read the description on the back of the DVD case.

Several friends are invited to a party in an abandoned hotel not knowing that it would be their last. Young people go to a party that would be the biggest and best they would ever attend not knowing that it would also be their last.

That’s right, what looks like a two-sentence paragraph is actually two drafts of the same sentence, strung together. And the literary skills on display, even in the revised version, leave a lot to be desired.

And why do I showcase this for you? Mainly to point out that, as bad as this description is, it’s better than the movie is. As cliched as this variation of the “spam in a cabin” plotline appears, there’s at least the implication of drama, suspense, some semblance of structure. Any of which would have been appreciated in this movie. What we got instead was…

A priest? Or a mafioso who can’t tie his tie? You be the judge.

You ever have one of those nights where you eat out at a new restaurant or grab some bad pizza, and you end up spending from 1AM to 4AM with a raging case of diarrhea, the kind that pushes you out of bed every twenty minutes for yet another trip to the can? It’s like the worst kind of eternity there is, as despite your hopes for sleep, you know that you’re going to keep squirting for the next couple of hours, and no amount of Kao Pectate is going to keep the rest of the night from being a tedious, trickling exercise in exhaustion.

Yeah. This movie’s like that.

Plot? Please. This isn’t just your garden-variety meandering, story-lite movie. It aggressively and vehemently avoids having a plot. It revels in its complete meaninglessness, brought about by a confluence of malformed directorial intent and pure incompetence before and behind the camera. It’s the perfect antidote to any joy I may feel at those rare nuggets of success in the microbudget arena; a movie like this makes me wish that only studios with a hundred million dollars to blow could make a feature film. It makes me wish that the Department of Homeland Security would license and restrict consumer-grade digital camcorders, and place the adjudication of their use in the hands of former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Because making out in the cemetery always turns out SO well.

Nevertheless. In the place of anything one could legitimately identify as as plot, we have some recurring motifs. The central role (I refuse to call him a “character”) is a young man named “Story,” which I can only assume is the universe’s way of mocking me. (Sorry I can’t tell you which actors played which roles; the credits somehow neglect to give this information.) We first meet Story as he gazes into a reflecting pool while wearing the worst approximation of a priest’s collar ever seen. He is approached by a blonde who starts babbling to him about needing mercy, and whether he’s the chosen one. Their conversation continues in a church, where against a backdrop of candles, they provide the framing device for the rest of the movie. By which I mean, occasionally we can cut back to him as he says something which was probably meant to sound cryptic but comes out nonsensical and inane.

Which description perfectly fits the rest of the movie. Story is this guy. He knows this other guy named Ray Harker, a round-faced fellow who is evil in some nebulous way. He’s, like, inside Story’s head, and shows up from time to time so that only Story can see him. That’s in addition to those scenes in which Harker is present so that everyone can see him. See, because one of the omnipresent “themes” of the movie is the complete blurring of the line between reality and dreams or hallucinations or something. But what nobody realized is that when both the dreams and the reality are presented as confused, disjointed, uninvolving, and breathtakingly boring, not a damned soul’s going to care about this ever-so-artsy (and gosh-darned original) ambiguity.

Um, yeah. “Boogah” your own damned self, Harker.

Story also has a girlfriend, Angelica. Many of his hallucinations revolve around her, either committing violent acts against her or vice-versa. His reaction to all of the above is pretty much constant: He stares straight ahead with a pained squint, delivering his lines with that tone of tortured resignation that you remember from high school from that guy who thought he was profound because he listened to The Smiths. Oh, and Angelica’s father is a police detective, which means that he wanders around the movie at random, pointing guns at people belligerently and demanding to know where Harker is. Because Harker is, like, evil and such.

Angelica, by the way, is actually played by two actresses. Half an hour into the movie, in a scene in which Story and Angelica #1 and two friends are in a car, everyone leaves the car except the girl in the back seat, who starts talking to the director and telling him that she could play the role so much better. The unseen director-character talks it over with her, and she entices him with her body; in the next scene, she’s Angelica. The two actresses alternate throughout the rest of the movie; in one scene, each one plays the role from a different camera angle.

And this year’s award for “most visible cameraman in the mirror” goes to…

This breaking of the fourth wall is a recurring bit throughout the movie, as the director stops the action and berates the actors for their lack of passion and intensity. Although even in these parts, the “actors” are still all called by their characters’ names, and the police are still after Story to find out about Harker. Except for the scene in which the director stops the cop actors mid-scene, and they start complaining about not understanding the script.

The director-character’s stated theme for the movie is, “It’s all bullshit,” a sentiment Harker repeats often as he appears and reappears and meets Story in different locations and tells him contradictory things. Why they decided to screw around with a ninety-minute feature to convey a theme better expressed on a bumper sticker, I’ll never know; by the time the closing credits mercifully begin to run, the “It” of that statement has pretty much defined itself as “The filmmakers’ delusions of competence and relevance.”

Still don’t know what the movie’s about? Good. Because any attempt to assign an “about” to this movie would be the equivalent of identifying bunny rabbits among random cumulus clouds. There is no “about.” This movie is ferociously dedicated to being senseless and incoherent, operating perhaps under the delusion that incoherency is synonymous with some kind of depth. It’s a film of such all-encompassing storytelling incompetence that, if it were entirely the work of a single person, one would immediately suspect the existence of a well-advanced brain tumor. As it is, with several people joining together to “craft” this complete waste of effort, one can only surmise some bizarre toxic seepage in the local groundwater.

Don’t bother tracking down the DVD — experience the same effect using common household tools!

Has my utter contempt for this movie come through clearly enough? It is not engaging, entertaining, intriguing, or challenging in any way save that involving the willpower not to turn it off. It is a mass of pseudo-experimental pretension that wasn’t worth the time it took to watch it, much less the effort it took to make it. I would not be surprised if I were one of fewer than five people ever to sit through this misbegotten exercise, and I feel I am the worse for it. And if you will now excuse me, I am going to treat myself to the comparative pleasure of pounding myself on the head with a rock.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 30 (counting each character as many times as they’re killed, real or not)
• breasts: 4
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: Oh, holy hell.
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0