Def by Temptation

What in the blue hell did I just watch? This is like if The Room was intended to be a horror movie, but had equal difficulty sticking that genre landing. If this movie can be accused of having a plot, it is minimal at best, it’s consistently baffling, and not because of complex storytelling but because the movie either over- or under-explains at the wrong times. The movie isn’t acted so much as compelled at gunpoint. I’ve seen more commitment to roles in kindergarten plays. The script is so full of cheese, it qualifies for a farm subsidy. If you played a drinking game for all the cliched, hoary lines you’ve heard in a million other bad scripts, you’d die of alcohol poisoning before the opening credits finished. When the soundtrack isn’t using a K-Tel’s best-of-early hip-hop at every opportunity, it’s using a score that could not be less appropriate if it was replaced with the Benny Hill theme. The editing is like someone chopped up the film stock, threw it in the air, and then reassembled it in the order in which it appeared on the ground. The direction is bizarre, mostly taking place in three locations, but somehow making every location feel like an alien planet. There is literally no choice, no facet, no piece of this movie that can be viewed in a positive light. Time and space will not allow it, for it could cause a singularity to erupt. And yet, this movie is utterly FASCINATING. Like The Room, it is a catastrophically inept train wreck of a thing, a “film” only because it appears on celluloid. But because it is so bereft of talent or competence or cohesion, it demands you see it through to the end. I can’t recommend it if you want to be entertained, because there is no enjoyment to be had here. But it will mesmerize you. You won’t believe that humanity allowed this to happen, and that one man (yes, like The Room, one man wrote, directed, produced, and started in it) could will this into being, but it happened. Oh, yes, it happened. I bore witness. I will never be the same. I gave this movie one star because it is unequivocally terribad. But if there was a "so bad it's good" scale on here, it'd get a four. This is the perfect "put a movie on with friends, have a few drinks, and riff" kind of movie. Hooptober 2021 movie #18/24