Baghead (Not A Story Of A Trooper York 3AM Date)

There's some well-worn ground in the new little flick Baghead. Four actors who long for bigger and better careers are inspired after watching a (amusingly pretentious) low budget film to go into a cabin in the woods to make their own picture. The sexual dynamics between them are ambiguous on the one hand, and on the other, one of them dreams of a man with a bag over his head, and turns them down the road of making a horror movie.

Until Baghead starts making his presence known and they start disappearing one by one...or do they?

So we have a relationship movie about guys making a movie, that's also a horror movie about guys making a horror movie.

It works pretty well. Someone on IMDB compared to the Coen Bros., but this is no Blood Simple. That said, it's not bad.

Our characters are: the handsome one (Matt, played by Ross Partridge), the nebbishy one (Chad, played by Steve Zsiss), the older-and-wise blonde hottie (Catherine, played by Elise Muller), and the new blonde hottie (Michelle, played by Greta Gerwig). Matt and Catherine are "beyond labels" in their relationship, while Chad is crushing on Michelle. Michelle, of course, is crushing on Matt, which pisses Catherine off. Chad is resentful of Matt, who he thinks gets all the girls, but Matt isn't doing too well, apparently, since he broke up with Catherine.

Somebody shoot me.

This stuff's all right. There's a lot of drinking. And scheming. But it's a bit slow.

It's also a bit familiar. I kept wondering if I knew these actors or I just knew a lot of people like them.

Baghead livens up the proceedings but the movie sort of plays with being a horror movie without ever actually being a horror movie. That's not necessarily bad, except for me finding that, when they finally commit at the climax of the movie, I was curiously unimpressed. I didn't buy it whole hog. The filmmakers didn't convince me that they would actually allow the things to happen that I was seeing.

Part of this is the limit of low-budget-ness. The camera's at a pretty removing distance most of the time. Part of it is the limit of the story, though, too. There's a sleight-of-hand that's not very convincing even when it's all laid out at the end.

But, all-in-all, not bad. Short. Fairly thoughtful. They do manage a few good scares, though I would hasten to point out that that's a relatively easy task compared to making an effective full-on horror movie.

Nonetheless, no point in critiquing it for not being what it's not trying to be. It does what it tries to do fairly well. So, good work to the Duplass brothers who wrote and directed.