2003, United States. Starring Phoebe Dollar, Laura Reilly, Dave Stann, Larry Sprock, Todd Livingston, Jed Rowen, Ashley White, Matt Nespoli, Krista Stilley, Joe Di Angelo, Monika Wild, Snakelady Rose, Joe Myles, Gary Levinson, Zenova Braeden. Written and directed by Brad Sykes.

I have a lot of good goth jokes, but unfortunately I've used most of them up over the years. Which is a shame, because this movie presents a perfect opportunity to trot them all out in one conveniently concentrated package. But no luck. I'm trying to repeat myself less these days. Plus, this is an off-the-cuff micro-review, so you're just going to have to roll with it.

I didn't realize how good I had it with Bloody Tease. Having said that movie wasn't very good, I immediately dashed out and rented another Brad Sykes shot-on-video micro-budget horror film, specifically because I'd been told, "Whatever you do, don't watch Goth. It's really awful." I couldn't write a better endorsement myself.

Of course, there are rare occasions when I should have taken such advice at face value. Bloody Tease was bad, but I could laugh my way through it without much trouble, and eventually you do get some boobs and a couple of those love-making scenes where the chick is willing to show her breasts but nothing else, so the couple makes love while she has a quilt or a sheet wrapped around her waist. Goth drains the fun out of a movie faster than a vampire stripper can drain a drunken frat boy but doesn't replace it with anything interesting, resulting in a painfully tedious and laughably pompous affair that would be perfectly acceptable as a sullen teenager's gothy vampire fanfic posted to an online forum, but is really unforgivable as even a micro-budget professional movie.

Chrissy is a pseudo-goth who goes out with her boyfriend one night and meets Goth, the goth who is so goth that she actually calls herself Goth. Goth talks about how many goth poseurs there are, which is funny, because after all my years as a punk rocker with plenty of goth friends, I'd say one of the biggest indicators that someone is a goth poseur would be if they did something like actually insist that their name was Goth. I'm surprised she didn't hang out with characters named Punk, Rockabilly, and Smooth Jazz McGhee.

Actually, put a hold on Smooth Jazz McGhee. He's going to be a character in my own vampire stripper epic.

Goth rambles on about the Three Laws of Goth, the rules written by Isaac Asimov that define the basic behaviors of a goth. These rules, and the whole ridiculously over-the-top character of Goth, must have been written by someone whose sole exposure to Goths was catching a couple Marilyn Manson videos. Now I'm an old man, and I know a lot of old goths from back in the day when we just called it death rock. Back then, being goth meant that you owned a Bauhaus t-shirt and listened to all the bands everyone pretends they liked in the 1980s when, in fact, they were all listening to Phil Collins, and listening to Siouxsie or Joy Division or The Cure got you beat up. That was about it. The whole white face paint nonsense started later, and it wasn't until much later that people started wearing those gigantic platform boots and leather trenchcoats with the cinched-in waist. I guess some bands, especially ones with industrial leanings (Thrill Kill Cult, etc) wore that stuff on stage from time to time, but it wasn't like today where every teenager in the city is perched awkwardly atop a pair of Klingon boots with foot-thick soles.

So this whole goth shtick as presented in Goth seems pretty goofy to me, but if that's what the kids these days have turned it into, I wouldn't really know or care. What I do care about is that all this self-important, "Lo, the darkness" dialogue is painfully corny and, even more importantly, dull beyond comprehension. The shock factor as Goth takes Chrissy and her useless boyfriend on a "tour of the darkness that is the true goth lifestyle" is utterly goofy, and the fact that this duo sticks with this nutjob no matter how boring her rants become pushes the film into the realm of supreme irritation. OK, we get a reason, however absurd it may be, for Chrissy sticking with this whole ridiculous scheme, but honestly, Goth weighs maybe a hundred pounds and is armed with a silly Renaissance Festival letter opener. How exactly does she manage to strike fear in the hearts of entire rooms, including rooms full of gun-toting hookers (don't worry -- the gun-toting hookers aren't nearly as exciting as they sounds, so you're not missing out). Does no one think to just punch this girl in the face? Or, you know, anything? It's just a curvy-blade dagger wielded by a giggling teenage girl, people! It's not like she's a trained expert with a knife or anything. How she manages to slaughter entire rooms full of people still send sme into fits of head-shaking.

And even though Chrissy is given a back story that explains why she is exploring the mystical and dark underworld of the goths, it still doesn't make much sense. It turns out Chrissy's sister was killed by a goth, though she soon discovers that her sister's dying word ("Goth") didn't mean she was killed by a goth, but by a person stupid enough to call themselves Goth. So Chrissy is secretly on a path of revenge, and yet rather than take that revenge on Goth any of the thousand times she has a chance to, rather than telling her boyfriend that, "well, it's about time we kicked this scrawny little psycho's ass," she just listlessly plays along with the murder and boring soliloquies until the finale where everyone gets Hunt's tomato paste smeared on them.

I don't mind complete illogic in a micro-budget film, though I certainly admire the lack of illogic on the rare instances it presents itself, but what I can't tolerate is movies that are illogical in the most boring ways, and furthermore, characters who don't act like or do things real people would do, solely because the script demands that they do something dumb in order to move the plot forward.

Goth is all the worse for its pretension of having some sort of deeper meaning than just being a really boring slasher/thrill kill film. Anyone over the age of 16 who still uses the word "poseur" or pulls out the "I shall show you the true meaning of my world" nonsense should just be kicked in the shin. Look, when I was a 16-year-old punk, I had a crush on this "normal" chick, and I pulled the whole mysterious, "I shall show you my world, but prepare yourself, for it is unlike anything you could have possibly imagined!" Of course, her world consisted of laughing and parties and having fun. My dark, dangerous, non-conformist world consisted of standing in a parking lot with a couple other people, looking sullen and talking about graveyards. It didn't take long for me to realize that, wow, my dark mysterious word was really lame. But even in my adolescent rebel stupor, I would have been smart enough to meet a chick like Goth and think to myself, "This girl is irritating."

On top of an intolerably boring script full of inane, high-school quality "embrace the darkness and see the truth" exposition, the acting is uniformly bad. This is nothing surprising in a mciro-budget film, but someday, people are going to figure out how to fix this. Phoebe Dollar as Goth turns int he best performance, simply because her character lends itself to scenery-chewing over-the-top excess. Laura Reilly as Chrissy is quite a beautiful young lady, but her character is horribly dull and, for being the heroine, spend smost of the time standing there doing nothing. The rest of the cast range from bump-on-a-log boring (Dave Stann as Chrissy's useless boyfriend, Boone) to hammy but not hammy enough to be truly entertaining. They're all inexperienced, working mostly in similar micro-productions, so they could use some coaching that they don't get fromt he director, to say nothing of a better script.

Even the effects look cheap and poorly executed. Usually, if nothing else, people are making micro-budget horror films purely because they want to show off their effects work. But here, even that is a major misfire.

Once again, I admire Brad and his crew for mounting and successfully making a feature film despite the obvious hurdles all micro-budget film makers face, but admiring the dedication and gumption is a world away from actually enjoying the end product. Like almost all micro-budget directors, Sykes relies on an incredibly weak script. The script is the cheapest thing to work on -- all you need is time and some paper, so I wish these directors and producers would put a lot more work into this stage of their film project, rather than rushing ahead with a script so weak that it makes the admirable quality of finishing a film seem unimportant since the film you finished is so uninteresting.

The only people I can imagine getting anything out of Goth would be either fellow micro-budget filmmakers who simply need to study the game (in which case, there's plenty of lessons to be learned here, though perhaps not as many as in a Todd Sheets movie) and goths who want a good laugh about the film's sundry, "this is what it means to be a true goth" lessons, which are about as accurate and valid as a big budget studio film's lessons on what true punks are really like.

For the time being I'm just going to reflect on the fact that Bloody Tease wasn't nearly as bad as I thought. That, and I should probably ponder the fact that at this point I'm still giddy about the next bad Brad Sykes film in my queue, if only because it features someone I actually know. I'm rooting for you, Brad. Don't let me down. Become a better filmmaker. Don't be Todd Sheets.

And of course, Goth completely fails to answer the one burning questions all viewers will come away from the movie with: who was driving the van?

Labels: Director: Brad Sykes, Horror, Microreviews, Year: 2003