Stephanie Lemons  

News Editor  

“After Last Season” begins the way most cult classics do; a man gets inside a makeshift MRI machine in what seems like an empty children’s bedroom, where the only décor was four printed out brain scans taped to the bright pink wall.

The main plot is supposed to be about two neurology students trying to solve a friend’s murder by conducting a telepathy experiment.

The acting gave me secondhand embarrassment. The script felt like a group of strangers passed it around, ignoring the plot and just jumped around with irrelevant ideas.

I can’t even begin to hate on the costumes, I’m sure they sent the actors into a thrift store where all the clothes were from the only early 2000s. One particular character wore a Union flag belt, and I don’t have hard feelings about his death being used as a catalyst for the plot.

With a reported budget of $5 million, there really is no excuse for how awful this movie looks; they at least could have splurged on some curtains so it wouldn’t look like the broke into a random house for rent.

The set was seemingly just small cardboard rooms build inside a warehouse as if a small child was left alone playing Sims 4.

The rooms they do have are barely furnished, with maybe one actual piece of furniture in each room to show what the room is supposed to be used for, such as a single bed frame in a bedroom, a beat-up office desk and a whiteboard in what must have been a classroom.

The set designers for ‘After Last Season’ don’t seem to care that they exposed the barren set. They don’t seem to care when actors are barely in the frame or the lighting looks like all they had room for in the budget was one lightbulb for the entire movie.

The movie did a terrible job of storytelling, leaving the audience left to look up a plot summary and details that should have been laid out by dialogue. Every time I watched ‘After Last Season’ (Yes, I watched it three times. No, I’m not okay.) I feel just as confused as the first time. Nothing makes sense, and there was no effort to make it make sense.

There’s very little continuity between scenes, and the audience is thrown into ongoing conversations with little context regarding the relationship between characters to each other and the main plot.

There was an attempt to be meta at the very end where it was revealed that a large bit of the movie was all a dream by one of the main characters. Given this movie came out in 2009, that trope has been beaten dead for at least a decade by then. It was probably a hasty, last-minute decision like every other decision.

In my opinion, the best actor in the movie was the MRI machine from the opening.

Gracing IMDb with its presence of a 1.6/10 -star rating, ‘After Last Season’ found an unintentional way to be genuinely entertaining – The IMDb comments.

Some of my personal favorites include;

“Okay so I just watched this movie and I don’t think the reality is real anymore. This is not a movie that is good. I mean this is not a good movie. I mean this is not a movie. Does this count as a movie? I have no idea. what is even happening anymore.”

“The actors look like someone is pointing a live firearm at them offset. The production design is terrible, you can see the seams of the set. The editing jumps around not really doing anything to further the. a plot, by the way, I still to this day I don’t understand. If I could give it something it looks like the maker of this film tried, and sort of cared about this film, but it doesn’t look like he knows anything about filmmaking.”

“This movie is a crime against humanity. You have [be] too involved in the creation of this piece to even pretend you like it. The actors, acting, set, soundtrack, CG, dialogue, sound quality, lighting, editing, script… All suck elephant balls.”

Most reviews mention how this movie had a $5 million budget and blew the majority of it on needless animation and ear-piercing sound effects. Many others sound like desperate begs for an answer as to why this movie was such torture to watch.

Another fun tidbit to mention is that the director of ‘After Last Season’ apparently used fake accounts to write positive reviews, which many other negative reviews mentioned since there’s no way a real human being could enjoy this movie.

I once believed I had the patience to sit through the worst of movies without having to take breaks for a palate cleanser, but I could not get through more than five minutes without stopping to look at literally anything other than my laptop screen.

Watching this movie was an experience. Mostly a negative experience, but the one shred of positivity is knowing I found the worst movie available and still have faith in filmmaking to never make anything quite as awful as this.

Email Stephanie at:

slemons@live.esu.edu