"The Off Season"

Off as in, "honey, does this milk smell a little off?" We get what basically starts as a road company production of the off-Broadway production of the graphic novel version of The Shining. Kathy and Rick have chosen to move to a small New England town so Rick can concentrate on writing his play/script/whatever. This is where the comparison to Kubrick's film basically ends, Outside of having a Scatman Crothers-like part filled by Angus Scrimm(best known as the "Tall Man" from the Phantasm series). We are spared having to deal with a rugrat(thank Jebus), lose the physical isolation(they are supposedly in the town during the off season, and they make much of the deserted look of the town at the start of the film, but in any street scenes after that, there seems to be a healthy traffic flow) and have the setting of the grand hotel replaced with a fairly scuzzy motel. After a little problem getting settled in(the landlady is intermittently either deaf, crazy or both, the first room they are put in had the walls of the washroom smeared with excrement, you know, the usual stuff), the kids get to business: Kathy gets a job at a local library, and Rick begins long, hard days of . . . not writing. Nope, he barely writes at all. Drinks a bunch at the local taverns and wanders aimlessly instead. Keep in mind that the movie has explained to us that this "getting away from it all" plan was Rick's in the first place, and Kathy left a pretty good job to be with him. Poor, gullible sap, that Kathy is. Rick proceeds to start hallucinating and hanging out with this incredibly sleazy guy that lurks around the motel(the actual producer of the movie! Ironic, no?). Kathy responds by catching what appears to be the Mongolian Death Flu. It's at the worst point of Kathy's illness that Rick announces to her that he and Sleazy Guy are heading off to California to pitch TV shows. He has to wake Kathy up, because at this point she's sleeping like 23 1/2 hours a day, she's so ill. "Bye hun, hope your lungs don't fill up with fluid!"(my line, not the movie). Thus abandoned, it's Kathy's turn to be plagued by hallucinations, or perhaps ghosts. One even gives her a good belt in the eye. There's some vague plot about a famous writer who lived in the town but got famous by writing tell-all novels about locals, and how the motel room collects the fear or shame or whatever of the spirits of the dead. This all ends bizarrely(like you couldn't see that coming), and really makes little sense.

The sweet, nutty filling of this film is just how poorly most of it appears on screen: a lot of the performances are rough or cheesy, the lighting is woefully inadequate, the camera work is really sloppy in places(award winning moment: when Kathy passes out from her illness and Rick gets her on to the bed and wakes her up to find out what's wrong, the camera remains centered on a side view of the foot of the bed, giving a glamorous view of Kathy's legs and Rick's back, for almost the entire scene), and the audio matches the camera work. Even the music and sound effects stumble, with my favourite being the overuse of that buzz/hum sound effect(as heard in The Mothman Prophecies and a handful of Japanese-influenced horror movies) that occurs regularly for no reason and at high volume. Look! Rick's on the phone! Cue the irritatingly loud buzzy noise! Wait! Now Kathy's making tea! More buzzy noise! Arrgh. Add to this a DVD version that includes as "Special Features" scene selection and language choice(or maybe it was Dolby/not Dolby choice: I sure as hell ain't renting it again to double-check!), and a Making Of feature that is primarily random footage taken by people on the set with videocams. Did I mention the box art, which features a decidedly non-motel looking building on a hill behind a graveyard, and the hands coming out of the graves? Find that sucker in this movie. Hell, find a grave in this movie. I double-dog dare ya. And I triple-dog dare ya, no returns to not watch The Off Season. The sanity you save may be your own.