I'm all for people doing what they love. Living the dream, trying to accomplish shit. But I also firmly believe in being a realist and realizing that sometimes, lots of times actually, most times to be honest, you need to be real with yourself about your abilities.
To that end comes Stiff. A super low budget movie that is more of a two person play let than an actual movie. The entire thing consists of two people talking to each other, and it still somehow manages to be a technical disaster as well as an acting monstrosity.
Troy wants to die, he repeatedly calls a suicide help line and talks to Lorri. Lorri eventually gives Troy her home number and the two arrange a face to face meeting where she reveals that she'll help him kill himself if he agrees to let her have his body after he dies, because ya know, she has issues too.
The editing is so horrible that even when they're face to face it feels like simple exchanges between the two people take forever. One person talks, linger..., the other person talks, linger...etc. If you can't even film a conversation competently, why the fuck are you making movies? Why? Perhaps if the acting and line delivery was crisp it might be able to make things a little bit better, but neither of the actors seem to be doing much more than reading lines. The guy, he's supposed to sullen and sad, but just comes off as boring and dull. I guess that's kind of close. But the girl, she's got inflections all over the place and random attempts at what she thinks emotions sound like.
About 45 minutes into the movie the girl has to do some actual acting and attempt to have a bad dream. My god. How can you not even flail your arms in a convincing manner? Seriously. The girl looks like she's walking through a field of bubbles as opposed to having a horrific nightmare.
They proceed to talk and talk and then talk some more, and then they decide that since he's a virgin she'll have sex with him before he kills himself. Having never done the deed, he's a bit awkward in his attempt to seduce her and ends up doing something that sort of looks like attempted rape. Now I said in a previous review that rape is never funny. I was wrong. The entire scene, they somehow manage to look more like puppets than human beings. Arms and legs go in random directions, she pushes him with all the force of a broken oscillating fan, to which he reacts like he just got shot. At this point I'm not positive that both actors aren't actually marionettes.
I have a friend who went to film school, and sometimes she'll show me some rare Italian or French movie that I admittedly don't get. The final 15 minutes of the Stiff plays out kind of like a bad film student version of those movies. We've got suicide, crying, necrophilia, flashbacks, a dead guys dong, necrophilia, more crying. Did I mention necrophilia? The only thing missing is balloons and moustachioed men eating sausages in black and white.
By the grace of god it ends, and then when the credits roll the first I thing I notice is that it took TWO people to direct this thing. The only logical explanation I can come up with is that they used the worlds heaviest camera.
This is clearly the work of a few people who have a strong desire to create something. And the basic idea isn't horrible. But the execution on every level, past perhaps the paragraph synopsis from which this 'film' was born, is terrible.
The entire crew should look at a career in sales rather than film making, because getting actual distribution is the biggest accomplishment of this entire project.
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