After Last Season [2009]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

A question we always find ourselves asking when we encounter bad movies is, "How much money was sunk into this disaster?" Sometimes the question arises because of a clearly high special effects budget or high price tag actors. Often the question comes up because a film looks cheap. The answer can often be surprising. "The Room" had a reported budget of six million dollars, which seems unlikely at first until you find out more about the places where that money seemed to have been put and that Tommy Wiseau is a madman. That being said, this film is by far the cheapest thing we have ever seen. We all made videos for high school foreign language classes in the mid-2000s that had higher production value than this film. And yet, the reported budget is five million dollars. This is immediately suspicious but it gets even stranger when you do a little research and find out that there is relatively little known about it, some sources question whether or not the director is a real person, and that after the film had a paltry premiere in four cities, the distributor called each theater individually and asked that they burn the film rather than sending it back because it would be cheaper. If that doesn't sound like a potential money laundering scene, I don't know what does. Someone didn't want this movie to get out. And yet, it did.

An accurate summary of the film, as far as we (well, Sarah) can surmise, is that it is about two med students who use some kind of mind reading technology to discover that one of them sees visions of future murders. They use this tech to catch a guy who has been offing people in her apartment building. In those words, it sounds kind of like an episode of Black Mirror but trust me when I say it isn't. I prefer this explanation from the IMDb user, GreatMovieCritic, "In a post apocalyptic world, two individuals meet in a large apartment complex, with rooms having been converted by a secret society to things ranging from hospitals to classrooms to apartments. Eventually, murder strikes in the sanctuary, as the two, Patricia and Matthew, come together to find the killer, putting together pieces of the puzzle in beautifully animated sequences. Eventually, the killer is found, and life in the institution continues as normal, as the residents worship Xenu for the rest of their lives." Let me break this down.

The film seems to have been entirely filmed in a decrepit warehouse and two rooms of a single house. What little furniture there is looks like it was picked up from the side of the road or it is made entirely out of paper. Also, the camera will frequently cut to furniture for a random moment for no reason. Because of the spareness of the "sets" it took us forever to figure out that these rooms were supposed to be separate places that represented a doctor's office, an apartment building, and some other rooms we couldn't really figure out. The film focuses on two main characters, but there are a lot of characters who are in random parts of the warehouse, having conversations about trivial things that don't apply to the plot. The actors from this movie mostly feel like people who were asked to come in off the street. They clearly only had one lamp for lighting and the sound frequently has that underwater interference like someone upstairs is flushing a toilet. As for those, "beautifully animated sequences," they look like early Playstation One graphics at best and 80s screensavers at worst. They are also supposedly where most of the money went. If you're wondering if there are special effects aside from the animation, well, there's a ghost who moves stuff. Riveting.

The most confusing thing about this movie is really the why. Not so much, "why was this made?" We know it was made to cover up a drug ring or something. The question is, "why was THIS movie made?" If you wanted to make a cheap film to hide money in, set it somewhere real that you don't have to do much to to make it look nice. Employ two actors who will wear their own clothes. Write a really decent script. Make a watchable movie and claim all the money went into salaries and rental fees or something. Basically, make "Rope" or "Venus In Fur" or "Rabbits" or anything else. If people think it's decent, they probably won't even question the money. While this, this we question.

Spoon Rating: 5*

It's not an abundant amount of laughs but it must be seen to be believed.