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Foolish Fantasy Overstressed Into Hokum.

rsoonsa | Lake Isabella, California | 01/13/2006

(1 out of 5 stars)

"The pervading quality of this low-budget film is so poor that one's potential interest is soon flung away by the general incompetence on display in a fantasy/comedy/horror hybrid wherein no category benefits from a successful effort, and in spite of some glimmers of talent provided by a few members of a multiple-tasked cast and crew, most viewers will be only grateful when this woeful affair finally ends. A young man and woman, Sonny and Addie, are on a camping excursion, and after Addie implores her beau to regale her with a spooky ghost story in their secluded cabin Sonny, a narcoleptic, drifts away into an apparent altered state and the subsequent narrative is comprised of his dreams, with unfortunate Addie somehow trapped amid them, with the majority of the action conveniently occurring within a nearby rural sleep deprivation clinic, as Sonny's patently quaint subconscious mind creates the entire rather aimless mess, although a viewer probably may not be consistently focussed upon, or indeed care about, any of it. An odd assortment of individuals is at the clinic, either as staff, or as research subjects, one of whom, "Dizzy the Drill-Bit Girl", having been without sleep for 16 days, is bent upon slaughtering everyone else present, invited to do so by her hallucinatory uncle. The work is replete with special effects that fail to offset continual gear changes in tone, mood, and pacing that make for an erratic cinematic vehicle. Since no plot synopsis will be comprehensible for a film wherein nearly all sequences make scant sense and are additionally quite stupid and often tasteless, one can only encourage Addie in her efforts to waken Sonny so that all of this can be finished. She is played by Beth Anne Garrison who gamely attempts to make something meaningful of her lugubrious lines, and the 35mm. camerawork is efficiently accomplished, but most of the acting, along with the direction, editing and script, are lacking in merit. The director, a California-based painter and creator of a "comedy" cooking program shown on public access television, reportedly has committed to a method of "non-traditional" storyspinning, but this piece is more foolish than non-traditional, and his employment of a single cognomen might better have been extended to total anonymity, far preferable than having within one's portfolio such draff as is seen here."