For better or worse, I suppose it’s telling of our culture that it’s now possible for a film to achieve “cult” status before it’s even been released. Of course, in the era of the long tail, that term has become marketing lingo with quite a bit of cache. Withoutabox, for instance, a website that allows filmmakers to submit to festivals online, lists “cult” as one of many “genres” (alongside Surreal, Neo-noir, and Dramedy) for filmmakers to choose from in creating a fact sheet for their films. In such a context, the term seems preposterous. How can something be cult if no one’s seen it yet? Films we now consider cult classics - Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, Rubin & Ed - were not initially conceived of as such. They were not premeditated efforts to appeal to not-so-distinctive coteries of pre-fab underground culture connoisseurs. Rather, they were the singular visions of people with singular ideas. I’m wary of the rise of self-conscious cult cinema.

But rest assured that the “real thing” still exists. There still exists the phenomenon of original, often bizarre movies, coming seemingly from nowhere, gaining buzz and popularity via word of mouth, and being discovered by small groups of people who are truly enamored with them. And just as has been the case with once obscure cultural relics of the past, the internet has had the delightful effect of broadening and accelerating that process astronomically. The story of After Last Season is also the story of how the internet is drastically reshaping outsider, underground, and cult culture at large.

This past March, a very odd trailer popped up on the Apple website. It seemed to be a random patchwork of scenes - mostly of people in sparse rooms having mundane conversations about locations, interspersed with simplistic CGI of geometric shapes. The description was little help in filling in any of the gigantic gaps in the film’s story left by the trailer: “The end of another season has brought more than the usual change in temperature to the residents of a city. As they go through some tragic events, the residents, and especially a group of medical students, must reevaluate their lives and face new questions.”

Word quickly spread throughout the tubes. Most were perplexed. “I’ve watched this at least ten times in the past hour, just trying to figure out why it exists,” wrote Lindsay Robertson from Videogum, “From the cardboard MRI machine, to the ’special effects,’ to the people, to the chair, to the sentences, this trailer is truly unfathomable. Like the Songsmith commercial, it seems like it could only have been made in a parallel universe that irony forgot.” A Facebook group was formed. VH1’s Best Week Ever blog preemptively declared it “The Worst Movie Trailer of 2009.” Alternate Takes, the cinephile website known for posting lengthy, in-depth analyses about art films, devoted an intelligent, 5,000+ word roundtable discussion to the two-minute-long trailer. And all across the blogosphere, writers sloppily smushed together the names of familiar films and directors with odd choices of adjectives and stale metaphors for outsider-ness in winding run-on sentences that attempted to convey their bewildered astonishment. “It’s like Todd Haynes lost his mind after Safe and was hired to direct a series of cable access sci-fi infomercials,” wrote IndieWire. “It’s like Eyes Wide Shut by way of David Lynch doing Brecht on acid. Otherwise, it’s Ed Wood looking like Orson Welles,” wrote one Filmmaker Magazine blog commenter. “Some sort of Dogme ‘95 parody?” guessed Videogum. (My reference points? The Room, Samuel Becket, Primer, Hal Hartley, The Boss of It All, Miranda July and The Science of Sleep but without all the colors.)

Theories abounded. Some assumed it was a post-modern art film, rife with straight-faced irony and intentional badness. Many thought it might be a hoax or a prank. The most common hypothesis was that it was a viral marketing campaign for a different film. (Somehow, somebody got the idea that it might be part of a campaign for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are.) But then details started emerging. Knox Road snagged an interview with a flustered Mark Region, the film’s director, who said that Apple’s classification as a comedy was inaccurate. “The movie is more like a Hitchcock film, dark and mysterious.” He also revealed that it cost $5 million to produce, most of the money coming from local investors. Then lead actor Jason Kulas sent an email to FilmDrunk, spilling the beans on some production process details: “To use time, and film stock efficiently, a number of times Mark didn’t shoot the scene, but rather just individual lines from various scenes, out-of-sequence, in close-up.  He planned to assemble these shots in editing to form the scene.  Mark seemed to already have the entire film visually in his head, right down to what shots, angles, masters, and close-ups would be in a scene. […] This allowed him to do things like have 1 setup, like a close-up on one actor, and he’d have them perform just line 18 from scene 80, then line 12 from scene 20, etc.  With a little attention to remaining footage, this approach let him pack dialog lines into every last bit of film before retiring that reel, and without having to move the camera or lights.”

Full interviews with both Region and Kulas in Filmmaker Magazine shed even more light. Region revealed himself as a real-estate business manager living in Tewkesbury, Massachusetts with no prior film-making experience. When asked what films have influenced him, he replied, “I have probably seen all the movies that people have seen — films from some of the blockbusters to less well-known films. I like them all. Dumb and Dumber from the Farrelly Brothers – that’s funny. And then the Indiana Jones movies. (Laughs). ” It was now abundantly clear that After Last Season was a true work of outsider art.

The film was slated to be released in four cities (Lancaster, CA; North Aurora, IL; Rochester, NY; and Austin, TX) on June 5th, and there were people who were exited to be there. People made pilgrimages from cities several hours away. John Campbell, creator of the webcomic Pictures For Sad Children, made a t-shirt to wear to the theater:

Reviews began pouring in. Filling in some of the details, Rodney Perkins of Twitchfilm wrote, “Unbelievably, the film’s trailer, including the editing, is representative of the entire movie. […] All the scenes are shot in people’s rooms or unfurnished spaces with no effort make them resemble the locations that they are supposed to represent. Impromptu props made of cardboard and other discarded material are everywhere. […] Conversations come across as alternating statements with no relation to each other. […] Some scenes are perceptibly out-of-focus. There is a pervasive, muffled background noise. Scenes come and go with no continuity or explanation. Conversations often cutaway to shots of furniture and other items for no reason. A large part of the movie consists of the previously mentioned computer graphics, which are brutally crude. Although these graphics fit into the story, film leans heavily on them to pad out the 93 minute running time. Thus, the parade of colored circles, cylinders, birds, and fish tends to goes on and on as if the film went on pause and a screen saver kicked in.” He ends his review by stating, “This review has expended hundreds of words in an attempt to convey the nature of After the Last Season but this is a film that requires direct experience to comprehend. Even then, its mysteries will not completely reveal themselves.”

Film Monthly made comparisons to Hal Hartley and wrote, “[it’s] nothing less than a complete deconstruction of fiction films. […] After Last Season is what I imagine an autistic person might see when watching a film: stripped down to its absolute basics, there’s a lot of talking and some special effects, then more talking and some credits, and that’s it.”

Hammer to Nail wrote, “After Last Season is as bad as it looks, but its badness is of such a quizzical sort that it transcends mere incompetence. It is formally engaging, because it is so formally incorrect. […] To watch the film is to take in the vision of someone with a severe case of disconnection: what is most consistently striking about the film is that the gap between conception and realization is irreparably wide.”

One fan interviewed four of his friends in the parking lot of the theater after just having seen it. One of them described it as “a murder mystery that takes place in the architecture of the mind,” and went on to comment, “Mike very astutely said that most of the movie was set in this one room and by the end of the movie he still had no idea what the geography of that room actually was […] You’re missing out on a singular experience - I don’t think I will ever forget this movie.”

It would seem that those who merely dismiss the film or it’s trailer as “bad” are making a gross oversimplification. Certainly, the work of Henry Darger, Martin Ramirez, or The Shaggs could be simply called “bad” by conventional standards of artistry. But of course, they are much more complex than that. Whether entirely his intention or not, it appears that Mark Region has created a baffling and wholly idiosyncratic film - one that deserves serious consideration as a work of art. Of course, this is all conjecture… for now. After Last Season is set to be released on DVD in two days, and I for one plan on buying a copy. I’ve been let down by cult film hype many times before. But for some reason, this time I don’t think I’ll be disappointed.

The film can (supposedly) be ordered either from the official site or on Amazon.

Special thanks to Olivia for alerting me to the 8th wonder of the modern world that is the After Last Season trailer.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Film, Internet, Outsider/Amateur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.