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-By Frank Lovece
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The character actor DJ Qualls, an odd scarecrow whose eyes can turn
from befuddled to feral in seconds, creates a tortured and
believable loser in this excruciating exercise from writer-director
Vlad Yudin—whose bio says he completed “the NYU Filmmaking
Program,” i.e., a certificate from the adult-ed division, and which
should not be confused with an MFA from the vaunted Tisch School of
the Arts. That distinction helps explain how this indie
psychological seriocomedy could misfire as badly and explosively as
a cheap gun.
Poorly shot and lit, draggy and padded despite its short running
time and structured as a series of narrative hiccups, this
shot-in-2008 feature is also remarkably defecation-obsessed: One
character, a burger-restaurant manager, keeps talking about
“feces,” even in front of customers, and there’s a lengthy sequence
of someone using the toilet, with full facial expressions and
detailed sound effects. One janitor has brown stains on his uniform
after cleaning a toilet, with a plunger he brings into the kitchen,
while talking about feces. If this feces fixation had more than a
marginal relationship to the plot or to the characters, you could
rationalize it as thematically relevant. As it is, it’s just crap
in a crappy movie.
Qualls—who like co-star Nikki Reed is one of the four executive
producers—admirably gives it his all amid a sea of amateurs and of
such farfetched plot items as a motel clerk (Lawrence Feeney)
reading a porn magazine with his pants undone while a customer
waits to check in. Masturbation also figures into the hero’s
backstory. In a nominally naturalistic movie, all these
teen-horndog, gross-out comedy antics mesh badly and confoundingly
with what the filmmaker apparently intended as a trenchant story
about an alienated and potentially violent young man.
That would be Gregory “Joe” Wilkes (Qualls), a high-school dropout
and put-upon janitor at the rundown Burger Haven, whose martinet
owner (the talented William Sadler, sadly over-the-top as a
caricature) heaps gratuitous indignities onto this
lowest-of-the-low. On the day he’s fired, Joe’s finally had it, and
he buys a gun with which to go back and go postal. He winds up
taking a young woman (Reed) hostage but, not being a killer at
heart and not wanting to go to prison either, doesn’t know what to
do with her.
That could have made for an intense, two-character locked-room
drama a la William Friedkin’s Bug or even this past spring’s
surprisingly sophisticated, one-hour season finale of “Family
Guy”—which, ironically, also involved excrement but in a thoroughly
organic and logical way. Yudin instead intercuts pointless inserts
about the restaurant owner and his clueless interactions with
employees and others—none of which has anything to do with the
larger story. Add lame jokes about using a “meat extender” and
you’ve an idea of this ostensibly serious movie’s jarringly
juvenile tone. Even the film’s score can’t decide whether this is
an eccentric comic romance or an edgy portrait of a disaffected
loner.
Fans of roadside Americana will at least appreciate the film’s
documentation of the Hazlet, N.J., landmark Jim’s Burger Haven, a
former drive-in restaurant used as one of the film’s primary
locations. The decades-old joint, with its vintage 1960s signage,
has since closed, its place taken by an AutoZone car-parts store.
