Screamplay

Screamplay, if you couldn't tell by my rating, has a mountain of problems. Its principal actor is also its writer and director, and it shows. It's not just that the movie centers around Rufus Butler Seder. It's that the screenplay is very obviously a passion project, one he couldn't distance himself from enough to see it needed judicious editing, in the same way that mowing a lawn is editing. The script is relentlessly, almost antagonistically, messy. The story of a supposed genius screenwriter penning a murder mystery movie, but murders keep happening around him in the way he's writing, but the movie implies he's either magically manifesting his fiction into reality, or he's a killer. When the end reveal happens, it's somehow even less satisfying, because it makes no damned sense. Literally, it makes no sense; it violates logic. Actual space-time logic. And that's saying something in a movie this heavily stylized. The stylized nature of the movie -- filmed in black and white on a stage like a play, and dead center on the weirdness spectrum between Lynch and Waters -- is a choice, partially as a way to hide certain weaknesses as it is an artistic choice as it is to just be weird. But weirdness needs something behind it. Lynch knew that. Waters knows that. Their movies have souls underneath the jagged narratives and surreal imagery. All the elements that are their signatures exist to ADD flavor to the movie. Screamplay misses this lesson, thinking that the weirdness IS the flavor. The quirky cast of characters that live in the apartment complex with the lead character aren't fully realized characters; they're lists of quirks sketched on a napkin. The love interest is a girl-next-door that is almost always in a bikini. The former rock star that's also a prophet of doom and plays classical compositions on an electric guitar. The former B-movie queen that'll sleep with anybody and just wants to be told she's still pretty. They're little more than templates, and because of that, they all talk in similar voices. Nobody is distinct, but they're all odd, because that's all this movie has. I don't blame the actors here, and not just because, apart from two, this would be the one and only movie any of them would make. Don't get me wrong, nary a one of them is convincing in any way, but it's hard to say if the talent gap is in the person or on the page. Dialogue is atrocious, like a corny impression of a film noir run through a third-rate giallo knock-off. Direction is as dynamic as the home movies your dad made at the beach when you were seven. I swear every take was the first one, and not just because this thing must've had a smaller budget than a school play. I'd say the movie had a shoestring budget, but that implies it could afford shoestrings. Good movies know how to use small budgets to their advantage, accentuating the positive and hiding the negative. Clerks, Mad Max, Halloween, all these movies were made for pennies on the dollar, but maximized what they had and made the viewer forget they were watching a movie made on the cheap. Hell, one could even go the other way and make the cheapness part of the charm, like The Velocipastor, which goes to such ludicrous lengths, the cheapness is part of the joke. Screamplay tries neither of these. It just screams "I'M DIFFERENT!" over and over for 90 minutes and hopes you won't notice the lack of anything else of substance around it. It's like going into a story and the only thing they sell is a bedazzled statue of an axolotl that makes fart noises to the tune of "American Pie". That's bound to get your attention for a minute, but it isn't going to keep you from noticing there's nothing else around. Worst of all is that Screamplay is never either of the two things it seems to want to be: scary or funny. It's just unusual in a decidedly amateurish way, and a profoundly boring way. I won't say it's lazy -- there is definitely an artist's unfiltered vision on display in Screamplay. But that's just the problem; nobody was around to reign him in, and someone needed to be.