Friday, August 20, 2010

What is going on here?

Hello I am the movie encyclopedia and if no one else will see it, I will.

If you listened to The Demented Encyclopedia or have periodically read my site then you will know that I am a huge fan of That Guy With The Glasses, specifically Noah Antwiler of The Spoony Experiment. Well about a month or so ago he posted a Riff (his version of a Rifftrax) of an ENTIRE movie called After Last Season. After a day though the creators asked him to take down the video and instead Noah just posted an iRiff on Rifftrax.com. There was one problem though, I watched the first ten minutes and had to see the end. So I went to Amazon and bought the DVD along with the iRiff and watched it. It was amazing. But out of curiosity I decided to watch the film without the riff and just on it's own merits. Well I can safely say this makes Nudist Colony of the Dead and the Room look like Academy Award Winners.


I mean I have said numerous times that I'm a B-Movie critic at heart, or at least have the tolerance of a B-Movie critic. Stupid, low budget films amuse me and give me something to make fun of. If there is -sploitation in the genre, I enjoy it. But this didn't amuse me and after a while even making fun of it got tiresome. Why? Because the difference between The Room and this is that The Room actually has a semblance of a plot and it at least has a direction in which it's going. After Last Season is a low-budget snoozefest that could have been shot by a 5 year old. In fact I've shot better movies.

Here is the kicker though. The film had a 5 million dollar budget. Look at these pictures and tell me if that looks like a 5 million dollar budget fulfilled. I mean I could understand if a group of friends got together, spent about 500 bucks on tape and lights and made this film. It still would be crap but at least I could give them some credit for taking time to make a film. I know from experience that making a film is not easy and so I can respect indie, low budget films. But considering Paranormal Activity was shot on a 15,000 dollar budget and this is much, much more then that, I at least expected quality better than PA. It really makes me wonder what they spent all that money on.
The plot is a mess. It's random shots cut together with clips of dialogue that end abruptly only to show shots of doors, the outside and then cut back to bits and pieces of random dialogue. And that's the first half of the film. The second half of the film the HAS a plot but most of that plot is lost in poorly delivered dialogue, horrible CGI special effects and minutes of film that are literally lost to silent shapes floating around the screen. It's like watching a screensaver, a silent screensaver.

But the major plot revolves around two students who telepathically link together and they see murders happen before they actually happen. That's about it, or at least that's as much as they give us. The rest is left up to the imagination of the viewer, literally. If you can't make out some of the abstract geometric shapes, invisible attackers as being attackers and random cutaway shots to the outside as being pivotal to the plot, then this film is lost to you. Needless to say if you are a person without a whole lot of imagination (or for that matter even if you do have a lot of it) then this will be a boring, plotless waste of space.
The sets and effects are horrible and amateur. An MRI machine looks like it's made out of cardboard, X-Ray machines are just binging noises, tape and construction paper and plastered everywhere, you can see logos on boxes that they just taped over to look like sets, blood looks and has the consistency of strawberry syrup, the aforementioned killer first appears as boxes moving on visible strings...it makes Ed Wood look like Michael Bay.

The editing and acting is atrocious as well. All those cutaway shots are pointless, scenes cut too quickly or don't cut soon enough, random boom microphones can be seen as well as the occasional script and random person. It's like a 5 year old edited it. All the actors are stiff, wooden, stilted and they pretty much suck. They are monotone and watching paint dry is more interesting then them talking.
This film just sucks. And not in a so good it's bad kind of suck. This makes bad movies look like masterpieces. It looks and feels as if 4 people gathered in someone's house, made cardboard sets and taped over everything else with paper, hired random people off the street to read lines and made some geometric CGI shapes float around while 1 guy hits a synth note every 45 minutes or so. And this film was shot with a 5 million dollar budget. Whoever budgeted this film needs to be shot now.

It's utter, worthless, crap. Even riffed it's almost not worth it, but the riff is still funny. Avoid this film at all costs.

MY VERDICT: ABOMINATION TO CINEMA


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