8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magical, frightening, truly unconventional, July 18, 2011
This review is from: After Last Season (DVD)
This movie isn't the most visually stunning film. With a budget of $5 million, the entire movie will not look like the recent Green Lantern film which costs about $200 million to make. But the movie has some very realistic and frightening moments created through special effects. It goes beyond being just a small thriller. The experience achieved by the movie is sometimes disturbing and overall, it is magical. You won't be able to tell the difference between what is real and what is not real by the middle of the movie.
After Last Season starts out like a joke. At the end of the movie, you begin to understand why some scenes and some sets appear so outrageous. After Last Season stars Jason Kulas (who plays Matt), Peggy McClellan (who plays Sarah), Scott Winters (Dr. Marlen), Casey McDougal (Anne), Joan-Marie Dewsnap, William York and Tristan Cole. In the future, the main characters are tied to some murders and use a new technology. They filmed the movie on 35mm and it is rated PG-13. The DVD has 5.1 surround sound (which is neat for many parts of the movie.).
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling Experiment, February 7, 2010
This review is from: After Last Season (DVD)
I suspect director Mark Region is a "character" created by a more established director for the purpose of using incompetence as a narrative framing device. You can almost imagine him saying "No, deliver that line with less genuine emotion! Be more awkward. Act like you're auditioning for a high school play you really don't want to be in"; or "This set isn't shabby and alienating enough. Glue some wallpaper to that wall, strip it off, and then tape some paper over it!"
In other words, you'd have to know what you were doing to screw it up so precisely. This is slapstick filmmaking: the film literally trips over own shoelaces in the most absurd and outrageous ways possible, and its antics really do manage to push our buttons. The meaningless dialog gives the film a sense of oppressive isolation; the cardboard sets foreground the relation of representation to reality.
Once you accept the film's conceit -- outrageous incompetence as framing device -- it becomes less hilarious and more disturbing. There's much talk (none of which moves the plot forward, mind you) about schizophrenia, neurological disorders, and nerves -- how nerves can, for example, be grafted from one part of the body to replace damaged nerves in another part of the body.
I'm not suggesting that the subjective experience of severe mental or neurological illness is the "meaning" of the film, but rather that the film's pretense of absurd incompetence invites speculation about the relationship (or lack thereof) between reality and perception, both in film and in human consciousness. On that level, it's an unnervingly effective film, well worth watching, and completely unlike anything you've ever seen before.
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11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Keeps you on the edge of your seat., March 26, 2011
This review is from: After Last Season (DVD)
Not a masterpiece. Not an action flick. Still has some action in it and it will keep you on the edge of your seat. Low budget movie with adrenaline. I wish I could have seen this movie inside a theater when it was released in 2009. The effects you get from the movie would have been ten times greater. Excellent DVD. Well worth the money.
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