AFTER LAST SEASON (2009)

AFTER LAST SEASON (2009)

Directed by Mark Region

“The end of a season means … the beginning of a new one.”

Characters are framed in the camera dead center, overwhelmed by surrounding blank space, lit harshly full-on with floodlights. “It’s been many years since I’ve been in the area,” one performer says. Plastic boxes are pulled across a rug with fishing wire. A ruler hangs in the air, held aloft by dental floss. “Oh, I've never been to that town, but I've been through it,” another character says. One female actor has her hair brushed in front of her face in an attempt to disguise her participation in the motion picture at hand. “There are some printers in the basement you can use,” says the male lead. There is no musical score, mostly just the faraway sound of gurgling on the soundtrack that recalls a toilet flushing two doors down in an apartment complex. Mostly, there are lots and lots of crude computer animation as composed on an Amiga computer circa 1986. Lots and lots and lots of it.

The viewer has stumbled into the bizarre world of After Last Season, one of a quartet of films that is hot on the current WTF? Circuit. The midnight movie has recently enjoyed resurgence in the 21st Century, but audiences this time aren't flocking to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) or El Topo (1971). A new type of film is lighting up the nights at ye olde repertory movie theater – misguided, personal projects from renegade filmmakers who don't get that the joke is on them.



The late John S. Rad's Dangerous Men (2005, covered extensively in Screem #12), James Nguyen's Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2008) and Tommy Wiseau's The Room (2003) are all drawing hipster crowds to laugh hysterically at beyond bad motion pictures. Free of major studio constraint, these film-fans-turned-directors crank out monumentally inept flicks that have to be seen to be disbelieved. Happily, these self-proclaimed auteurs adopt positive attitudes, delighted that their films have found audiences and enthusiastic theatrical play.



Of this current crop of motion pictures, After Last Season is by far the most obscure, difficult to see and the least accessible. It's unquestionably the most bizarre of the four films. Minimal in the extreme, the shot-on-35mm epic played in only four move theaters in the United States (Lancaster, California, North Aurora, Illinois, Rochester, New York and Austin, Texas) for a single week, with exhibitors allegedly told to burn the prints in lieu of sending them back to save on production costs.

Season first garnered interest in a trailer posted online that posed more questions than it answered. Many had assumed it was just part of a viral campaign for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are (2009).



After Last Season's first scene, involving an MRI machine that is most decidedly is not an MRI machine sets the tone of what's to follow. The machine is a cardboard box, cut with scissors and dressed with butcher paper. Furthermore, the paper is affixed with highly visible masking tape. The room is a spare bedroom with pink walls and a ceiling fan. As if to hammer home this fact, the ceiling fan is awarded its own close-up. The final bit of art direction is 8 x 10 pieces of paper taped to the top of the wall to obscure wallpaper borders, affixed sloppily and threatening to fly away with a gust of wind from the aforementioned ceiling fan.



Contrary to what has been written about the film, After Last Season does have a story, albeit one told so ineptly it's easily obscured. There are a plague of murders affecting a small college town. The Prorolis Corporation (an indifferently framed building with the words burned into the film) is conducting mind experiments. Season's two main characters, Matthew (Jason Kulas) and Sarah (Peggy McClellan) commence to experimenting and stumble across the brain waves of the killer. The majority of After Last Season's running time consists of Matthew and Sarah’s mind experiments that are represented by the aforementioned computer animation. Countless Internet reviewers have tried to wax eloquent on Season’s allure, the most accurate being that is “an accurate representation of how an autistic person sees the world.”

Baffling, obscure and enigmatic, Season – now on DVD thanks to its production company Index Square entrances the viewer in the hopes that the audience’s patience will be rewarded with a coherent conclusion. There is a conclusion, but told so ham-fistedly it’s easy to miss. Think of the old “avenging ghost” story and listen carefully to the gal with her hair brushed in her face at the very end and you will “get” the film, but don’t feel like it was worth wading through the preceding to reach it.

An interviewer with director Mark Region appeared online in Filmmaker Magazine, and again, the interview raised more questions than it answered. “We made the sets simple,” Region told Scott Macaulay. “I used shots of walls to show the passage of time in some scenes and to show that something is happening at a different location in other scenes. For the rest we tried to keep the sets simple because of the budget.”



As for explaining the beneath-Edward D. Wood Jr. quality of the film’s MRI machine, Region says the “way it happened, first we made the MRI, and it looked pretty good from far away. We couldn’t tell it was made from cardboard or bits of plastic – it also has plastic. But when you shoot with 35mm, and sometimes because of the light, some lines across the front of the MRI became visible. When we shot, we couldn’t tell, but on film the lines are darker — you see it’s not a polished surface. That’s how the MRI came to be.”

To this writer, I was struck by Season’s striking resemblance to Paranormal Activity (2009) with its shared threadbare supernatural elements and mundane, ugly settings. However – whereas Paranormal Activity raked in millions of dollars on a budget for $14,000, After Last Season was produced for – gasp, choke -- FIVE MILLION DOLLARS, incurred largely by the investors who insisted on four-walling the movie to theaters.

After Last Season can be recommended to those on the search for something different – not good, mind you, just very, very VERY different.