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.

[M.10rda]

Well, thanks to you, my friends @ BadMovies.org, I watched AFTER LAST SEASON, successfully used the Search function (will wonders never cease?), and am reviving this here 15 YEAR AND 1 MONTH OLD thread in order to encourage discussion. 

100,000,000 cheers to Rev. Powell for writing and posting an extensive and cogent review (in 2010!) so that I don't feel obligated to mention many specifics of this....... object. Thanks, Rev!   

I do have thoughts, though. Many thoughts. I am going to try to corral them into, like, 3 paragraphs... instead of half a dozen. Anybody else have anything more recent (than 12/2010) to post about this one-of-a-kind garbage while I formulate a sober response?   

[zombie no.one]

I remember some buzz (or anti-buzz?) about this, but the clips I saw didn't quite draw me in enough to want to check out the whole thing... more kind of an 'okay I get the idea' situation.

[M.10rda]

Okay, it's a movie. It's a Bad Movie. But I don't think it's the worst movie I've ever seen. It did get me thinking, which says something about it.

InformationGeek (what ever happened to him?) compares AFTER LAST SEASON to MONSTER-A-GO-GO. I have famously defended M-A-G-G as a Great Bad Movie, one of my favorites. I think the comparison falters for at least one crucial reason that Rev cites in his 2010 review of ALS. Objectively speaking, M-A-G-G exhibits reasonable grasp of simple "film grammar" - to extend the literary metaphor, it simply refuses to provide an appropriate conclusion where one expects it (intentionally, I think). In contrast, ALS is all over the place grammatically, syntactically, structurally, et al. It almost appears illiterate - nothing on its "page", so to speak, is where it belongs.

It appears that many reviewers on Letterboxd are convinced that AFTER LAST SEASON's auteur Mark Region intends for it to be every bit as willfully discombobulated as it appears. This is a little bit more extravagant a leap of faith than my modest suggestion that either Bill Rebane or H.G. Lewis or both intended for MONSTER-A-GO-GO to have a flagrantly impossible twist ending. (Obv one or both did, or else its ending might... be less ludicrous.) So one major question about AFTER LAST SEASON that presents itself is: Did the writer/director intend to make such a senseless and apparently inept Bad movie, or was he trying to make a Good Movie and fumbled catastrophically?

There are a couple of strong arguments for the first option. The more speculative (yet somewhat persuasive) argument is that AFTER LAST SEASON was some PRODUCERS-like tax scheme. Region claimed the film cost $5 million, yet it looks as cheap as any movie made in the 21st century that I've seen (even including the circa-1998 toaster-level computer graphics). The almost-entirely amateurish cast was supposedly paid SAG rates and some of those actors verify that Region shot the film on 35mm (which seems impossible when one watches the thing), but beyond fees for talent and celluloid processing and post-production, there appears to be barely a hundred bucks onscreen. Did Region make the cheapest-looking, most unappealing movie possible - insuring that no one would ever want to pay to see it - then walk away with $4.75 million or more in his pocket?

Or - as many fans seem to think - was Region some sort of genius prankster who successfully produced the most painstaking deconstruction of cinematic language - or "film grammar", as Rev puts it - in film history? Like....... a Godard film that goes beyond Godard's standard (and excessive) Commitment to the deconstruction Bit? The best reason to suspect that Region meant to make AFTER LAST SEASON like this is his extraordinary attention to the appearance of inattention to detail... that's to say, his dedication to making every single last aspect of the film appear as careless, shoddy, and cheap as possible. I don't think that's an understatement - every single shot of this film either starts too early, or lasts too long, or contains bizarrely inappropriate and/or dysfunctional mise-en-scene, or has one or more actors blankly delivering dialogue that seems utterly beyond their comprehension or curiosity, or otherwise shots appear that serve no purpose but to frustrate the viewer with their pointlessness. That's the entire film. Mathematically this gestalt degree of accidental Badness seems implausible. As the saying goes, even the stopped clock is right twice a day, and so it usually goes for Bad Movies too. There are things that MONSTER-A-GO-GO manages to get right - or MANOS or PLAN 9 or GHOSTS THAT STILL WALK or you fill in the blank here. In order to get every single part of one's film to be hopelessly Bad - well that seems like an indication of (shall we say) Intelligent Design.

Now, the lead actor has gone on the record in interviews about Mark Region appearing utterly earnest about making a film that was both Good and Successful, thus said lead actor is the Prime Witness for the Defense against claims that Region was trying to manufacture a Bomb. Personally, as the lead actor appears profoundly intellectually incapable on screen (as do most of the other performers in ALS), I place little weight in his ability to accurately gauge and vouch for the character of a potential mastermind con artist/artistic charlatan.

Also, there is one element of Region's film that betrays some effort and possible cleverness - the dialogue itself.  Unlike the film grammar (which is disastrous), the composition of the dialogue effectively evokes and draws this viewer's attention to tangible motifs and themes, such as perception, illusion, dissociation, and relativity. The structure of the screenplay then dismembers and reassembles that dialogue in a way which is harder to make sense of... but so then does MEMENTO. Barring the non-continuity editing, the dialogue in ALS (as in MEMENTO) can be made sensible.

So this leaves me leaning in the direction of the second option - Mark Region was on to something with this film, but (as does sometimes happen) managed to miscarry his concept in its execution, perhaps by overconfidence in his own cleverness. I'm still ruminating on this, but ZombieNoOne's reply has given me some mental ammunition.  Alas, AFTER LAST SEASON is a big (if Bad) deal - it's epochal Badfilm. I guess it will take a while longer to fully unpack!

[Rev. Powell]

I'm pretty sure Region just blatantly lied about the budget. IMDb doesn't exactly send out a team of fact-checkers to verify budgets of independent movies.

If Region had done all this intentionally, he wouldn't have pulled the film from distribution. I was lucky to get my DVD order in just under the wire before he pulled it, put all this behind him, and went back to doing whatever he was doing before he decided to make a movie.

The lead actor also verifies that Region had no idea what he was doing and that the cast was completely confused during filming.

[bob]

After Last Season is pretty awful & one of the worst films ever made

The title also makes no sense

The Room is a cinematic masterpiece compared to After Last Season

[Trevor]

The lead actor also verifies that Region had no idea what he was doing.

Sounds like me on my first day at film school 😳😄😉🐢

[Rev. Powell]

The lead actor also verifies that Region had no idea what he was doing.

Sounds like me on my first day at film school 😳😄😉🐢

Trust me, you were a much better filmmaker your first day at film school than Region.

[Trevor]

The lead actor also verifies that Region had no idea what he was doing.

Sounds like me on my first day at film school 😳😄😉🐢

Trust me, you were a much better filmmaker your first day at film school than Region.

😅😀😃😂😄

I needed that LOL thanks 😀😃🐢