No more books!

scrappybilly

Fateful Findings is a new film directed by the up-and-coming and relatively unknown Neil Breen. It is a political thriller of sorts with paranormal and cosmic undertones including, but not limited to mushrooms that turn into magical crystals, spiritual beings and a car accident that turns someone who already had special abilities into some sort of super genius who now has incredible hacking abilities, is a scientist and well-regarded novelist.

This movie is being touted as a new The Room, a movie so bad that its badness transcends everything that we know about bad movies and becomes sort of brilliant.

Take, for instance, a series of scenes in which the main character, also played by Neil Breen, appears to transport himself into a magical crystal, and the set inside of the crystal is clearly just a basement lined with trash bags to give the illusion of a shiny, black stone. Or the awkward sex scenes, or the insistence that he definitely show off his ass for some required auteur-related nudity.

I'm a lover of bad movies. I think that bad movies can be equally entertaining as a great movie. The only difference is that what is so enjoyable about a bad movie is unplanned and completely unintentional. They work as the best kind of comedy, being totally devoid of self- awareness. A certain amount of schadenfreude is involved when you get so much pleasure out of these movies, because you're always aware that the director and his cast and crew set out to make something legitimately great and entertaining, but failed miserably along the way. We laugh at the movie screen not because of some wonderfully witty banter, but because each reaction shot seems to be filmed on a different day with a different lighting set-up and no consideration for the audio matching the rest of the scene.

If you, too, are a lover of bad movies and cinematic failures, Fateful Findings will be perfect for you. It was a sincere effort to say something meaningful, obscured through bad writing, terrible performances and direction that never really found any sort of groove. The opening shot of the movie is pretty damn masterful and builds tension and you're thinking that you might be watching a movie from a skilled craftsman, but immediately after that, the movie looks like an after school special from the 1980's, and then the cinematography only gets worse from there. It's like the quality declines and then does a reverse plateau somewhere near the bottom and flatlines from there until the movie is over.

Fateful Findings is good, very good, but not great. It won't rank as highly as The Room, Birdemic or Troll 2 in years to follow. It just doesn't have the personal auteuristic passion of a romance that had gone sour, obviously inspired by a real breakup. It doesn't have the spectacular set-pieces involving birds that crap acid and explode when they hit buildings. And no one pisses on hospitality.

"No more books!" is going to be the oft-quoted line from this movie, when our main character chucks a book he wrote at one of his five laptops that he utilizes for hacking "the most secret government and corporate secrets" despite never being on. He mostly just sits at a black screen and clacks away and nods, letting us know his efforts are successful.

Through a series of events including a pretty realistic looking car accident, our main character meets up with his childhood love, now working in the hospital he visits during his recovery. He mentions to her that he knew he was in love with her when they were 8 years old, which means I guess that they're the same age, even though he's gotta be at around 60 and she at least half that age. Because this movie was written and directed by the star, every woman in the movie seems to have a huge boner for him, everyone from his drug-addicted girlfriend to his former childhood love to the teenage neighbor next door.

I'm unable to write a straightforward review for this movie because it doesn't follow any sort of traditional narrative. I mean, it has a beginning, it has a middle, it has a climax and some sort of resolution at the end there, but the plot itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is magic and gems and floating vapors of ghosts and mysterious men with strange abilities, leading to a massive exposé on corruption, but how all of those things actually fit together is anyone's guess. It could be argued that Neil Breen is employing some Lynchian, dreamlike logic to his movies and has created a low-budget surrealist masterpiece— the black gem of this movie is like the blue box from Mulholland Drive. If that's the way you want to read into it, awesome.

If you have an interest in cult movies, watch Fateful Findings as soon as you can at your local grindhouse or when it inevitably becomes available on home video.

score 8/10

scrappybilly 31 January 2014

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2968353/