Bad Meaning Good case study #17: 'After Last Season'

Monday, May 24 2010

In April of 2009, myself and DJ Intel launched the 'Bad Meaning Good' monthly movie event at The Burlington in Chicago (which takes place on the first Monday of every month). The idea behind the night is to screen cult classics, exploit movies, unintentional comedies and every other kind of film we collectively decide is so bad that it's actually good. In the ongoing search for the perfect 'Bad Meaning Good' film I've decided to take on a weekly (or AT LEAST once-per-week) blog entry in which I'll review, summarize and rate bad movies of every variety imaginable. The goal is to reach somewhere in the range of 75-100 posts within a year, at which point I'll look for a place to publish a first volume of 'Bad Meaning Good' reviews in book form. Stay tuned...

Bad Meaning Good case study #17:
'After Last Season' (dir. Mark Region)

Summary:
'After Last Season' is a baffling, ultra lo-fi, would-be technological thriller unlike anything I've ever seen. The film deals with a pair of young interns researching neuroscience in a quest for answers regarding a rampant serial killer. Ultimately though, if you could imagine how 'Primer' may have turned out if it were directed by a schizophrenic 12 year old in 5th grade AV lab, you might begin to understand the forces at play here.

To make sense of the film's "plot" is an utterly frustrating endeavor and I'm not even sure the film's director could make a good case for the its narrative logic (let alone its nonsensical pseudo-scientific logic). Most of the film sees its two central characters, a man and a woman, using crude transmitters that while placed on their respective temples, grant them a one way, stream-of-consciousness brain "feed" of sorts. By that I mean that when these two are experimenting with the transmitters, they are both fed a kind of visual representation of one of their brain's thoughts which appears to them in the form of primitive 3D motion graphics (the transmission goes one way, meaning that only one of their brain's activities can be visualized at once). The majority of the film alternates between the real world that is the two of them sitting in a sparsely decorated room with their eyes closed and the representational world of the mind which consists of ugly, animated shapes moving around unintelligibly.

There are also some tangential plot lines and characters that come and go (mostly at the beginning of the movie), many of which I'm unable to logically connect to its main story. Believe me when I tell you there's some serious Ed Wood-ian shit going on here and an overarching sensibility of disconnect from both expository coherence and basic human communication. Sitting through the film in its entirety was at times an excruciatingly perplexing experience, full of so many head-scratching moments that it actually kinda made my brain hurt.

I'm just gonna face the facts: I haven't the faintest fucking idea what this movie was about. I'm not sure anyone involved in its production really did either. In the case of analyzing "bad" movies though this is of course a non-issue... Because if there is any fun or enjoyment to be derived from 'After Last Season' (and my initial sense is that there is very little), it is without a doubt BECAUSE the film is so ludicrous and unfathomable.

How 'Bad Meaning Good' was it?:
This film is so badly, spastically edited that it at times feels almost surreal or like a kind of outsider art. There are incessant cuts and edits, often within shots of the very most dull and simple conversations, and the film stocks and lighting fx are in a near-constant state of flux. There are shots of digital still frames that linger uncomfortably long and they even at one point made use of what I think was a green screen of an apartment hallway (as if there weren't an available hallway to shoot in). There was also a still frame of a building with text layered over it in post-production which I think was meant to convey that the building had big, block-y text attached to its exterior. Needless to say, this particular viewer was not fooled by the effect.

The lighting is often stifling and obnoxious, and the majority of the movie is lit with spotlights that leave huge shadows hanging off every object or person in the frame. Additionally, most scenes appear to be shot in unfinished rooms, leading me to believe these spaces may not have had electricity or lighting of their own and that the constant spotlighting may have been done out of necessity. What's worse is that the spaces often have exposed dry wall, errant 2x4's and unfinished ceilings. (Where the fuck do buildings look like this?! ) From one scene to the next it's completely ambiguous as to whether the characters are in public, work-related, or residential spaces and generally the viewer's sense of space is suffocatingly claustrophobic and devoid of natural light. It felt like it was filmed in some kind of hellish, insane asylum constructed out of budget-level Home Depot odds and ends.

There are props EVERYWHERE in this movie and in a bizarre twist of scientific logic, these props are often moving, being pushed about by an invisible force (a force which could be described as "loosely explained" at best). On top of that, basic objects like, say, a table, are often visibly just cardboard boxes with a makeshift cloth draped over them. Little to no effort is made to disguise this stuff and they even at one point submit an entirely unconvincing MRI machine that was clearly handmade out of foamcore, sheeting and other artificial materials.

... And all of this goes before we've even begun to speak about the acting or the script or any other of the hundreds of puzzling decisions made in the creation of this film. I don't even know if there are words available to describe some of it; it really is that particular breed of rare presentation that needs to be seen in order to be "understood".

I'm ultimately so confused by what I've seen in 'After Last Season' that my words feel like a futile attempt at reconciling the experience. This movie, however clinically and comprehensively awful it may have been, was definitely unlike anything I've ever encountered in film and for that reason alone, I feel like it must have some merits. When I think I better understand what those merits are, perhaps I'll chime in again. Until then, I'll have no choice but to remain amazed, a little bit embarrassed, and with an hour and a half of my life lost in the ether.

'Bad Meaning Good'-O-Meter:
4.0/10 (... Though this admittedly useless rating is surely subject to change over time and further examination.)

Tags: Bad Meaning Good, Bad Meaning Good Case Studies

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