After Last Season (2009)

[InformationGeek]

Now here I am, listing to Spill.com Worst of 2009 podcast when one of them brought this film up.  He said it was the worst film of the year and even went so far to say it was the worst film of the decade.  Now I can't say much to that since I've never seen the movie, but man, that is big words to say about the film.

From what he said, he mention that film was only shown in four theaters in the U.S., was made on a budge of less than 5 million, and the company actually said that the theaters could destroy the film after they were done screening it because it was too expensive to send it back to them.

Here's the website: http://www.afterlastseason.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYXRD_jOO48

[Rev. Powell]

I'm going to be reviewing this one before the year's out.  Looking forward to it.

[InformationGeek]

So I have officially seen the movie now and I must say, what the f**k was that?  This film goes beyond mere words for me, but I'll try.  This is without a doubt truly the worst film of the past decade.  I say past 2 maybe, but its got hard competition with Pocket Ninjas.  The movie is so bad that I felt like I was getting flashbacks to my time with Monster A-Go Go and it is on about the same level as that movie, though the film never has spots where it becomes impossible to see.  The editing is an abomination and makes me assume that the editing was done by a monkey high on cocaine while have elliptic seizure (WHY THE HELL DO WE CUT AWAY TO A CEILING FAN MORE THAN TWICE IN A FILM?!).  The acting is so forgettable, bland, and terrible that it almost doesn't exist.  This film holds the new record for the worst set design I have ever seen beating out both Future War and Monster A-Go Go.  My 6th grade class play had better special effects and a better story to boot.

There is nothing to be said more about this film.  It is evil.  Monster A-Go Go, meet your illegitimate brother!

[Rev. Powell]

I published my review of this about a month ago, but it was lost due to my problems with my webhost.  I recovered the review from Google and I'll reprint some selections of it here.

'Huh?, 'um...' and 'whah?' are all equally valid responses to After Last Season.  This movie may go down as this generation's Beast of Yucca Flats: stultifyingly dull at times, but so full of misguided directorial choices and  failed attempts at cinematic poetry that it takes on a dreamlike character.  Watching After Last Season is like trying to follow a old timey radio monologue on an AM radio station with fading reception: you can tell there's a voice trying to make itself heard, but the transmission is so garbled that the basics of the story become lost in static and long stretches of dead air...

There's a concept in cinema theory called "film grammar;" it refers to sets of filmmaking conventions that  have been proven over time to work to tell a story to an audience in a coherent fashion.  A director breaks these "grammatical rules" at the risk of confusing and losing his audience.  Here's a very simple example of a "grammatical" movie "sentence": a two way conversation starts with a shot of the character who's speaking, cuts to a reaction shot of the party who's listening, then cuts back to allow the speaker to finish his thought.  In After Last Season director Mark Region consistently exhibits atrocious film grammar: he will have his speaker deliver a line and then pause awkwardly, then cut to a shot of the listener reacting to a few moments of silence, then cut back to the speaker, who resumes his thought.   This isn't a common sort of gaffe; it's more the equivalent of consistently putting adjectives after nouns.  Another norm that should be self-evident that Region likes to break is "don't focus on long, undramatic shots of furniture during transitions."   He's not just content to mangle the small-scale standards, either; he breaks the big storytelling rules too, rules like "don't include a scene of your main character discussing which floor has a working printers unless the discussion has some relationship to the plot,"  "don't have any scenes of completely unnecessary characters discussing genealogy while giggling inappropriately," and "don't make one third of your movie a dream sequence unless you have a reason to."  New characters, or shots of exteriors (or furniture), are introduced without any context and edited randomly into ongoing conversations.  The results are so incoherent and disorienting that it takes two viewings just to verify that there is not a real story hiding somewhere in this mess.

Adding to the oddness, almost the entire film seems to have been shot in one large, vacant house: a medical examining room appears to be someone's bedroom, with pink walls, a ceiling fan, and an MRI machine made out of cardboard boxes taped up with sagging contact paper.  (The plot doesn't require an MRI machine, in case you were wondering, but the movie pays it a lot of attention nonetheless).  Region is also fond of taping pieces of paper to walls; usually, the tell you what set your viewing, such as "Prorolis Corporation," "Psychology Exercise," or "Cell 1″; but sometimes he inexplicably tapes blank sheets to the exteriors of buildings.  You feel almost saddened for the actors, who aren't very good or charismatic but obviously received no help from the script or the director; it's painful to watch them just standing around, not knowing what to do or how to react as they're being assaulted by invisible forces throwing chairs or stabbing them with unseen knives.  There's almost no soundtrack, but at times little bursts of a piano or organ playing an odd, semi-melodic series of notes breaks into the action.

This mix of a thin paraspychological plot that's approximately 50% padding, incoherent storytelling and incompetent production might have produced a bizarre enough concoction, but the weird little cherry on top is the "telepathic" scenes brought to us courtesy of outdated software that was probably originally intended as an aid in architectural design.  (The credits tell us it took ten people to put together these sequences, but you would never be able to tell from the what appears onscreen).  The resulting visions are blocky, abstract geometric designs.  Sometimes they resolve themselves into recognizable objects like automobiles, and in one case into fish in an undersea coral reef made of floating cubes and conic sections.  One ambitious animated scene recreates a murder, with a faceless killer wielding a conical knife against a slow-moving cartoonified woman.  Mostly, however, we watch abstract shapes floating around in space at different vectors, sometimes colliding and bouncing off each other.  These scenes are long and essentially add nothing to the story, but they contain some nice weird and moody sound effects; focus real hard, and you might be able to achieve an altered state of consciousness off them.

 

[Flangepart]

Ewww...thanks for the warning. Yeah, I think Infogeek is onto something here. What was the camera monkey on, and where can we get some?

"This generations answer to THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS"...and Thats a terrifing image.