Director: Mark Region
Screenplay: Mark Region
Producers: Mark Region
Starring: Jason Kulas, Peggy McClellan
Year: 2009
Country: United States
Running time: 93min.

(1/5)

Folks, we have a potential new contender for the title “worst film ever” – and a potential new cult hit among a certain kind of audience (that is, snarky and/or high). Just for fun, here’s the synopsis writer/producer/director Mark Region has placed everywhere for the film: “The end of another season has brought more than the usual change in temperature to the residents of a city. As they go through some tragic events, the residents, and especially a group of medical students, must reevaluate their lives and face new questions.” Okay, a murder does take place during the film, which counts as a tragic event. And the main characters are medical students. Beyond that, this synopsis is useless, because it suggests that there is some thought somewhere in or behind the film, which does not appear to actually be the case.

So here’s what really does happen. A man with Parkinson’s Disease gets an MRI (the nurse helpfully tells him to stay still) in an MRI machine that appears to be made out of a cardboard box with a sliding shelf. This has nothing to do with anything, except the man randomly shows up later for no purpose. Later two medical students (the two bright young kids on the poster up there) get schooled on what schizophrenic brain scans look like. You can try to make the rest of the film make sense by references to schizophrenia, but honestly, it’s probably not worth it.

The film really starts when the two medical students start doing a psychic experiment with a set of chips that supposedly let one person read the other’s thoughts – thoughts which are portrayed to us by 3D graphics done by someone apparently introduced to 3D modeling software roughly 24 hours ago. This is the best part of the film. Seriously. (Well, okay, maybe the part where chairs start throwing themselves around is the best.) Here we also find out that med student Sarah saw a vision of a recent murder before it happened. And guess what? While they’re doing their experiment, she sees another!

But if you think that means the film will get an interesting mind-bending plot, or get exciting and scary, you’re mostly wrong. There are a couple of queasycam shots that are a little creepy, but they don’t connect to anything else. In fact, very little connects to anything else. I think the basic editing principal was “we have this scene, let’s do eenie meenie miney moe to see where to drop it in.” Also, apparently Region had a lot of leftover B roll of shelves, furniture, and paper arrows stuck on walls, and couldn’t bear to part with them, so those shots are stuck in everywhere randomly as well.

You have to seriously wonder if it’s all some massive joke, because you’d basically have to try to make a film this technically bad – meaningless editing, pointless inset shots, extremely earnest dialogues about nothing, composition that routinely ignores basic elements like the rule of thirds, sets that look like they broke into an under-construction office building and used whatever materials were lying around, sound that must’ve been captured with consumer camera mics, a group of actors that as a whole are easily the worst I’ve ever seen, no real plot development or climax, etc.

And yet, seen with a group of people willing to MST3K the hell out of it, there’s something strangely entertaining and enthralling about the film – I certainly had no desire to stop watching it at any point, and I found myself genuinely trying to figure it out a couple of times. Because honestly, a set of mind-reading chips that help you figure out murders before they happen? Not too original, but you could see there being a story there. This isn’t it, though. But it’s just so ludicrous, I couldn’t help enjoying the experience.

Here’s the trailer, which was apparently widely considered to be part of a viral marketing campaign for some other film (widely rumored to be Where the Wild Things Are) because no one could believe this film actually existed: