No, just.... no

Quinoa1984

Full disclosure time: I watched Fateful Findings not necessarily with the intention of expecting a legitimately good movie. It's a sad state of affairs to do this when there are legitimately good to great films waiting to be taken in by my eyes and ears. This said, after witnessing the s***-spectacle known as Double Down, my intrigue for a Neil Breen film shot in HD and this time with more actors than just himself on a rocky ledge with a bunch of laptops and tuna fish cans and maybe one or two others shot up. Hell, I'll say it, I was hoping for a good, hysterically so terrible it's wonderful time, as it is not something out of the bland-bad product factory known as Hollywood's genre world, but rather a singular vision. As it turns out Fateful Findings didn't disappoint, per- say, except to note that it may take the title for the worst film ever made.

Yes, somehow, this is at least in league with After Last Season. It's hard to be more terrible than that poor excuse for a snot rag, but this time Breen outdoes himself from Double Down in some ways; here he gives himself a "character" (must use quotes) who as a child with another girl found some magic rock by a tree or something, I don't f***in' know, and years later is a famous novelist working on his latest book... OR IS HE?! He also has a girlfriend and some neighbors or other friends and yet he is actually not writing a book but is hacking into all of the secret government secrets that there are to hack, and he needs a bunch of laptops you see, so then he tries to make sure that no one sees his secret unless he somehow gets close enough to someone but then they can't tell but wait what about his therapist and oh no I've now been trapped in a run-on sentence.

This is sheer madness and a level of technical and storytelling ineptitude that is out of this solar system. It may not be *as* incomprehensible as Double Down, but Breen makes up for that by giving us... do I call them characters or placeholders in his weird- ass plot, who are generally terrible people. And all the while the production value is like that of a cheap porno, but (usually) without the porn. Oh, there is some "sexual" elements (lots of side boob, though not quite full on nudity), and not unlike the other towering 21st century Master of Bulls*** Cinema, Tommy Wiseau, he can't help but show his butt at one point to the camera.

No, what makes this so absolutely, mind-bogglingly, spectacularly, horrifically bad is the direction. This is direction that sinks to such lows that it goes past the Earth's core and comes back on the other side, like the old thing of "you'll dig all the way to China". Not one moment in this movie, from the performances to the would-be story, is convincing, but Breen thinks he's like the Edward Snowden of filmmakers (maybe with a touch of, uh, Billy Jack Goes to Washington), letting us all know that EVERYTHING IS CORRUPT and must be unearthed so that (spoilers, who cares) the politicians and lawyers and Wall Street crooks can admit to their crimes and proceed to (I'm not making this up) shoot themselves and kill themselves because... WHY!? Not to mention many scenes where Breen, surrounded by his laptops (I thought maybe it'd almost be genius of him to keep adding or subtracting laptops from shot to shot, hey, who would know), gets frustrated and throws his books (wait, are they actually Bob Woodward books?) and then... oh, nevermind.

All of the acting has at best a flat tone and at worst the sort of energy that sucks the life out of a room. There are many moments here that can bring out the "WHAT?" reactions out of an audience, but it's also worse to take in than something like The Room because there are stretches where there's no real 'kick' to the dialog. It almost seems like it takes a skill, ironically, to f*** up on every level of filmmaking: of (not) directing actors), of (not) having a convincing and memorable score, of (not) having shots that match up in the editing, of (not) having anything coherent to ultimately say about... well, anything, whether it's the Government or novelists or romance or uh supernatural rocks that make people sometimes teleport (huh?) Oh, and it wants to be deep and amazing too - nothing like some pretension to add on top of the pile of failure.

In brief: this is the opposite of good, the KFC Famous Bowl of movies.

score 1/10

Quinoa1984 7 September 2016

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3539688/