After Last Season (2009) — Triskaidekafiles

AFTER LAST SEASON

WRITER: Mark Region

DIRECTOR: Mark Region

STARRING: Jason Kulas as Matthew Andrews

Peggy McClellan as Sarah Austin

Scott Wintes as John Marlen

Casey McDougal as Anne Plaven

Joan-Marie Dewsnap as Haley Marlen

William York as FBI Agent Henry Hem

Tristan Cole as Eric Nelson

QUICK CUT: People learn to connect with the help of a psychology experiment.

THE MORGUE

Matt - A medical student testing out some brain chips to connect minds between people

Sarah - Another medical student also working on the same project.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! We are finishing up January, and as is the tradition, I have chosen a doozy of a movie to do near my birthday. And how did this even start? This tradition is ridiculous. Ahem. Anyways, I digress, and present to you, After Last Season.

After the credits roll over wonderfully discordant plinky piano music that literally just sounds like someone hitting keys randomly, the movie begins and oh, it is already go time, my friends.

We are in someone's home, but it's TOTALLY a hospital, with an MRI machine made from cardboard boxes, and photocopies of brain scans on the wall. I am already in awe.

…I only just now notice the shoes someone must’ve taken off as they entered the front door.

Someone with Parkinsons is being scanned in the boxe...er, MRI machine, and OH GOOD LORD even the doctor's desk is a cardboard box. Aaaand she blows a line. Which honestly doesn’t bother me that much, it almost adds some normalcy and humanity as someone stumbles over their words, but we are so early in this already slapdash movie that even this stands out.

All the while, we keep cutting to random shots of walls, that are usually poorly framed. Actually, a lot of this movie is poorly framed, but I digress.

Y'know...it's not the cardboard MRI. It's not the cardboard desk. It's the sheets of paper along the top of the wall to create molding that really gets me. Look, I could go through frame by frame with a breakdown of everything wrong, but we'd be here for days. Let me see if I can speed this up some.

After his scans, the patient goes to wait for the doctor to tell him the results, and meanwhile that doctor comes into the room, with two residents, to talk more about MRI machines.

Ultimately this has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLOT, aside from there being other brainstuff later, and introducing a few characters, but otherwise, I could do without the history of MRIs.

Meanwhile, someone is heading home to her apartment, and on the phone with someone saying she lives on the third floor, and has a great view, because that is a perfectly normal convo to have with someone you know well enough to talk on the phone with.

There is also some guy in a chair writing, who is then outside his apartment, I guess because he heard a noise, and it jumps SO ridiculously back and forth between all these scenes, it is just a jumbled mess.

Ed hears a knock and goes to answer his door. When next we see him, phone girl is walking by his open door and sees him stabbed on the ground

We next jump to a couple of girls in a 'dorm room' that is really some unused office space badly dressed.

If you didn't believe it's a dorm room, they TOTALLY sell it one of the residents from the MRI lecture, Sarah, runs in from between a couple flats like this is a fucking stage play, to grab her physics book. Yep, 100% a dorm room, you convinced me, movie!

On top of all that, who are these people, and does ANY OF THIS BANAL CONVERSATION MATTER?? A clue: No.

Sarah rushes to some sort of trial she's involved in, and the research building's name is, I shit you not, badly photoshopped onto the side of a wall. I can't even, anymore.

And the hits keep coming, as the signs directing people to the product trial are all hand coloured arrows, because this movie couldn't afford signs, I guess.

Oh, and on top of THAT, we see someone reading 'the news' and it's a printout that looks nothing like a newspaper. This entire movie is just...just wow.

What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck.

She runs into the other resident at the office, and they're both coincidentally interns in this corporation. The movie points this out just so we know how weird it is.

These two blather on for far too long about more stuff that continues to have nothing to do with the plot, until they agree to meet up for the second half of whatever they're doing.

Oh, and this is all intercut with this movie's signature shots of random bits of walls. Look, the idea is to use those to denote passages of time, not just "Let's show some wall now!"

The cinematography of this movie offends me.

There's more scenes with the main doctor treating patients, and there's a LOT of talk, all throughout the movie, about brain stuff, and it feels like this COULD have been going somewhere. But instead it's just coming off like the writer knows just enough neuroscience to be dangerous, and wants to show off.

We sit around as people talk more about printers, and their father, and for the love of the phoenix ENOUGH TALKING.

Finally, Matt and Sarah meet in the room to do the thing this movie has wanted to do for the last thirty minutes. At last, the plot can begin.

Oh…oh COME ON. They printed out new names and authors, clipped them from the paper, and pasted them on real books.

Did this movie blow it's entire budget on glue sticks??

Next to them on the table is a box, about the size of a bankers box for papers, and Matt turns a knob on it, so the top can slide open. From it, he takes out two teeny microchips. This is a RIDICULOUSLY HUGE box, for such an itty bitty plot device. It's like opening a filing cabinet to discover a contact lens.

These neural chips will supposedly connect their minds when they each wear one, Matt will ask a series of questions, for her to visualise things, and he will see if he can pick up the images.

So Matt asks Sarah to picture an object, something simple. And thus begins the movie's landmark sequence showcasing cutting edge, 2009 era CGI! or...a bunch of simple geometric shapes.

I see…I see…an insult to the audience’s intelligence.

Matt is shocked, shocked I say, and says the graphics are so clear! Oh bite me.

He asks her to try something more elaborate, and the Silicon Graphics workstation chugs away to show us some floating cubes and then spheres.

It then ups its game with a pair of birds, and suddenly things take a dark turn. A pair of humanoid figures appear, and one of them stabs the other.

The pair are a bit shaken by this, neither of them were envisioning it, but they know one of the figures was Ed. In fact, Sarah says she could see Ed's eyes, and that Ed's face was "distinguishable".

Oh, and Sarah drops the bombshell that she saw the murder before it happened, but didn't understand, until after the fact. So I guess she's randomly psychic.

So, this is a good spot to pause for a moment, because I need to talk about this movie. I've been burying the lede a bit. No-budget movies are no stranger to Trisk, and from everything I have said and shown thus far, this sure feels like another one, and you could almost forgive it for that fact.

EXCEPT.

This movie. After Last Season. This movie had a budget of five million dollars. Five MILLION dollars. This movie doesn't look like it had a budget of five *thousand* dollars. For squawk's sake, there's wallpaper taped to the walls for set dressing. The signs are literally hand made. Their MRI machine is cardboard!! The CGI is laughable by 1995 standards, let alone 2009! Where did all that money go??

Knowing that this movie cost THAT MUCH, and THIS is what we got, is...it's mind blowing. And now that you are armed with this knowledge, gentle readers, you are prepared for further bullshit.

They continue on with the experiments, until another vision begins, and a house forms in the shapes that neither of them recognises.

Whaaat? How could you not recognise this??

We watch as these two sit motionless in a very empty room and narrate the bad cgi, interspersed with the real location, as a woman is attacked by a figure seemingly appearing out of nowhere.

The attacker conveniently has his face covered by a cgi ball, because there is every possibility we could have identified him from this low grade CGI.

We see a bunch of weirdness, that will be unexplained, as the CGI woman throws CGI objects at the CGI wall, like they are trying to show off what they are capable of doing. And let me remind you that this movie came out a YEAR after the original Iron Man movie.

Five MILLION dollars.

After finishing up the worst Sims playthrough ever as she's killed, we see someone find "Angie's" dead body. Like we’re supposed to know who she is.

So having just arguably witnessed a murder, Matt and Sarah decide to go to the cops and...HAHAHA, no, foolish people. They continue to sit in this barren room and use the chips to finish their assignments.

Why are we watching someone’s screen saver??

FIVE million dollars.

I have to say, narratively speaking, it takes some massive balls to have upwards of a third of your movie take place with cheap CGI while two people narrate what is going on, or just sit there saying *nothing at all*.

We do see a bit of PoV cam as someone stalks closer to the building, seemingly seeking out our two subjects, and images in the CGIscape slowly begin to reflect this as well.

Triangle Man, Triangle Man, doing the things a triangle can…

Five. Million. Dollars.

The door opens to the *ahem* lab, but no one is there. And faster than you can say, "Trumpy, you can do stupid things!", chairs, milk crates, and boxes begin shifting all over the room. Because the killer is invisible. Because why the fuck not at this point.

Both of them get cut by an unseen knife, and then proceed to fling themselves around the room. I have seen a lot of actors fight unseen forces, which largely means they are fighting themselves in the acting department, and this is, hands down, the worst I've seen.

Sarah is attacked, and just as something is about to happen...Matt wakes up in the lab as Sarah arrives the next week, revealing at least some major chunk of what we have just watched is nothing more than a dream.

*flips over tables*

Rather than investigate the intriguing idea of an invisible killer who can only be seen by somehow picking up on his brainwaves and witnessing the killings via technology, in some sort of weird supernatural scifi idea...we toss all that out the window, making the last 40 minutes an entire waste.

So instead we sit around and play 20 questions.

That gets interrupted when they hear a loud thump and rush off to investigate. They find a man with a bloody knife kneeling over a body, saying they want the last digits to the access code.

Yep, that's me. You might be wondering how I ended up here...

Miniature Richard Moll spots them and chases them back to the "lab". Once he gets in there, he gets hit with a flying chair, and is knocked out.

Other objects start to move, and an unseen voice eventually speaks to them. So there IS an unseen force, but he's a GOOD force, and NOT a bad one? I...I am so lost.

Magic Voice explains he can move objects, but right now he's having trouble movie a chair to show them. This is no budget movie speak for "we don't know how to do special effects".

He tries to move other objects, and finally succeeds with a ruler. Eric calls Magic Voice "Craig" and to the best of my recollection, he has no reason to know what this voice's name is. But it turns out he was stabbed, and then existed out of his body, because sure, why not at this point.

This entire scene is punctuated by our two...heroes...staring blankly and looking around confused.

But just as quickly as he was there, Craig is gone, and we jump to the killer in a room that we know is an observation room cell, thanks to the handy handmade signs tapes to the wall.

With him is an FBI agent (complete with handmade FBI taped to the jacket!) who we find out is...THE GUY FROM THE START OF THE MOVIE IN THE MRI MACHINE!! A reveal which...means nothing and changes nothing. Just...utterly pointless.

But he does explain that Eric Nelson, that's our killer, was at the building as a bit of corporate espionage to steal the brainchips, which apparently DO exist, and killed someone to get the codes. So somehow half the movie that was all a dream is real to some degree, but that doesn't explain anything.

And while the movie sure could end at this point, we get a whole bunch of scenes that call back to ones at the start of the movie, but are just more meaningless fluff. I am SO GLAD the random patient we haven't seen for 75 minutes can now raise her arm ABOVE her shoulder, instead of just to that level. Whew! If that plot wasn’t resolved, I don’t know what I would have done!

Matt is on the phone, talking about hot springs and...

WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HOT SPRINGS INSTEAD OF ENDING ALREADY?? Ahem. Matt has a jacket fall, and wonders if it's Craig, leaving us to question just how much is real as the movie's credits r..

OH COME ON it's still not over?? Two more actors that were barely in the movie, are showing off a house, one of them interested in buying it, they talk a bit, one of them shows pictures of her kids, pictures which are conveniently turned away and never shown to us when they're picked up, because you know they don't have any relevant photos actually in them.

But one of the kids is named...CRAIG! Dun dun dunnnnn!

Oh wow, Craig was really, uh...that...I have no idea who the fuck that is.

Okay okay, it took me several viewings, but we DO briefly see Craig for like, two seconds, he was the guy reading the 'newspaper' way way back that I made fun of. This, like every other reveal, is utterly meaningless, because "Oh wow, the spirit was actually that guy we saw doing nothing 90 minutes ago!" means nothing.

What...what an utterly meaningless movie.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: It looks all right, at least. Production values notwithstanding.

Audio: Some people have complained, but I thought it was mostly okay, save for some occasional bad recording.

Body Count: Eh, three whole bodies.

1 - Almost 11 minutes in, and we find Ed dead on the ground.

2 - Angie found dead after her CGI demise

3 - Someone gets stabbed

Best Corpse: Oh, none of you deserve this award this week.

Blood Type - F+: Barely scraping out of the bottom of the barrel by the splotch on Ed, and the bloody knife.

Drink Up! Whenever there’s a random cutaway to the wall.

Movie Review: What more is there to say? Actually, I am gonna take a wild stance here, and after several hundred words of stomping on this thing, I am going to be one of the few people to actually say something nice about this movie; there is a genuinely worthwhile plot somewhere in here. Ignore the dream ruining half the movie. If you take some sort of neural interface experiment, that allows people to somehow tap into the thoughts of a killer (Maybe he’s a former user of the tech), and then its a race to catch him before he kills you, THAT is a genuinely good idea. This is basically the same sort of plot as The Cell. Or, you could sit in a room, narrate bad CGI reels, and have utter nonsense. Heck, you could even find a way to work in the invisibility, and/or have a former victim also trying to stop the killer. But the movie we got is not that, and takes a decent scifi thriller idea, and presents it in the most banal way possible. Aside from that, there is nothing here of note. The dialogue is bad to nonsense stream of thought, the production values are non existent, the CGI section would have been a cool experiment in 1990, but is just cheap in 2009. All of this punctuated with moments of nothingness and rambling dialogue that means nothing and adds nothing. One out of five CGI cylinders.

Entertainment Value: This is surprisingly difficult. There is some genuine hilarity to be had watching this in disbelief, as the train wreck keeps going, but it’s also just SO boring as so much of the movie is two people sitting and narrating CGI. There’s a lot of fun to be had watching it all unfold and just how weird this gets, but it’s also a slog to get to those moments of WTF. It’s worth watching just to see that this movie does indeed exist, but I also say stay away. Three out of five MRI boxes.