Customer Reviews

After Last Season

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.).

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.

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.

Heard about this movie and decided to see what the movie was about. I first saw the original trailer. My impression was that the movie is a comedy. I checked out its official site and found another more recent trailer that gives you a better preview of the movie.

The movie is not a comedy. Granted some things in it are unusual. Mostly it is a ghost story with an extra dose of realism. Very entertaining. I highly recommend it.

From the opening, After Last Season starts to grab your attention. The movie doesn't resemble your standard movie. Events start to happen that are mysterious and baffling. You see a snapshot of the lives of the characters. Jason Kulas as Matt introduces you to a new world of technology. Peggy McClellan as Sarah shows you a dimension of technology that you have never seen before. They are fascinating. and for some of us who are young at heart or teenagers, humor is present in the story. The other actors like Scott Winters, Joan-marie Dewsnap and Casey McDougal are serious and funny. Great way to spend a Friday evening.

Took a break and watched the movie. Loved the movie. A view of the future mixed with some thriller. I recommend it to anyone who wants to get away from their busy life or who wants to spend an evening watching a movie.

I teach video arts on the community college level. Over the years I have assigned students to create short "movies" illustrating the principals they had learned in class. These "movies" average seven to ten minutes in length and have zero budget. Every one of those works stands as high art compared to "After Last Season".

This film is a must purchase for every teacher of video production, or cinema arts of any kind. I refuse to believe that it is possible to make a movie this totally inept having ever actually seen another movie. Take your pick from sound, lighting, framing, composition, story, sets, props, special effects, writing, acting, blocking, editing, blah, blah, blah, the creator of this wonderful mess, can't possibly have ever seen another movie! I tell my students that after consuming professional video, essentially since birth, they have an innate sense of what "looks right", I stand corrected! However, I didn't give this movie five-stars for its educational value, it is highly entertaining and was actually commercially distributed!

A movie reviewer friend of mine turned me on to this and I am so glad he did. The DVD is available from Amazon or the movie's official website. You will never find a better party DVD than "After Last Season". WARNING! Do not watch this thing alone! Use the buddy system and invite a room full of friends to share the risk and the laughs. You will need to plan several breaks during the show, since the camera work, video quality and special effects are so bad they do actually induce some disorientation and frankly your jaws will need a rest from laughter. It is intended as a murder mystery/sci-fi/horror script. I won't go into the plot in any detail, since it is totally beside the point. You and your friends will laugh until your faces hurt and I suspect will be talking about "ALS" for years to come. If you want a little taste, go to the movie's "official" website and watch the trailer (be sure to catch the cardboard and copier paper MRI).

Take a cheap camcorder to the Zoo, throw it into the chimpanzee cage and I guarantee what comes out will be ten times more professional than "ALS" (even if it's just a smashed and feces covered camera). An elaborate hoax, film school project gone horribly wrong, or the work of a completely sincere and totally clueless dork, "After Last Season" is not to be missed!

After Last Season was not what I expected it to be. It appears to be something then as you watch it, it turns into something else. It looks like the people behind the movie went out of their way to create a different kind of movie. Some scenes contain the simplest sets. The computer animation is primitive one moment and sophisticated in others. The special effects are plain and visible one minute and the next they are photo-realistic. It seems like the director wanted to leave just enough clues in the dialogues and designs to tell the viewers what is going on. It looks like he may have left too few hints because if you don't pay attention to the dialogues, you can easily lose track of the plot. I watched the latest trailer on the official web site and that helped me understand what is going on. You know the names of some of the characters right away. Needless to say, you don't have to understand the whole plot to be captivated by the movie. It is thrilling and scary just by watching it.

Is the whole movie an accidental work? Did all the pieces, the actors, the designs, the editing come together by accident? I'm not sure. To me, they were struggling to make a movie. I would say it is an accident. I also think an accident like this rarely happens. Five stars for the thrill ride.

I would consider my self a little more than a fan of bizarre cinema, and this just happens to be one of the most bizarre films that I have ever seen. It's not that the plot is all that strange, it's a murder mystery with a little SciFi thrown in. It's that the entire film looks as if someone who had never seen a movie created it. For starters, there is an "MRI machine" that is obviously made out of cardboard and covered in white paper, and the room that the "MRI machine" is in is obviously an apartment bedroom with a ceiling fan, pink walls and carpet. Not the environment in which you would typically find an MRI machine. The first ten minutes of the film are devoted to a scene in which a doctor explains how the "MRI machine" works in a way that any layman would and it turns out that the "MRI machine" really has nothing to do with the plot of the film. This is just the first 1/6th of the film!

A good portion of the film is obviously shot in a warehouse with strange set pieces (usually with paper stuck to them), and furniture that no sane person would use. I was constantly asking myself questions like, "Why is this "bedroom" completely empty except for that industrial metal self?" or "Why is only half of that wall covered in wallpaper, and why are there a bunch of exposed pipes in this 'office'?" I still don't understand why they couldn't use regular furniture, like a couch or a table, or shoot in a furnished house or office.

The golden moment is a scene towards the end that takes up at least 1/3rd of the film, and it consists of two doctors sharing thoughts via this tiny chip that they place on their temples. The shared thoughts are actually terrible mid 1990's 3d computer graphics. Seriously, they look as if they were created by an infant, and apparently this is where most of Region's budget went. During this sequence things in the "office" start to move of their own volition and the killer (remember, it's a murder mystery) enters the room, but he is invisible. Then, it turns out that this whole part of the film was a dream, there really is no thought-sharing ship, and the killer isn't invisible. I want to mention quickly that during this sequence of events, one of the doctors is having some sort of psychic connection with the killer, and they have a vision of a man banging on a door in what appears to be a storage closet and he blurts my favorite bit of dialogue: "Hey, someone left a book in the living room, is it yours?" The film is rife with this sort of dialogue.

Anyway, I gave the film 80% because I honestly couldn't tell if the awfulness was intentional or not. I believe that one really has to try to make something this bad, because it is bad on so many levels: set design, acting, dialogue, plot, editing, sound (traffic can often be heard in the background), effects, etc. If it is intentional, then this film is a brilliant jest on the film industry, if not, then I have no idea how this film was created and actually got distribution. But seriously, get a bunch of friends together, have some drinks and watch it, but be sure to openly mock it. It's the only way I made it through, and it made for a really enjoyable experience.

I'm not a professional movie critic. I'm not even an amateur one. But I know what I like and I like this movie. What I don't know is why. If you go in expecting the movie to be really really bad then you won't be disappointed. However, that low expectation leads to heightened anticipation (everybody wants to see just how bad it really is) and an openness of mind that allows you to accept it as it is presented.

I highly recommend this movie but... as a friend who saw it with me stated... it might help if you're stoned the first couple times you see it.