PSYCLOPS (2002) *1/2 You know how sometimes the impact of a film is neutralized by the fact that the director can't quite figure out what kind of film he's trying to make, so he makes two or three films at the same time? Here Brett Piper is making at least 17 films, the problem being that only one or two of them are interesting in the slightest. The only way to keep things entertaining is to pretend that the "actors" are desperately competing for some fort of "best actor" award. This is at least enough to vaguely amuse some perverse minds, and so I hereby declare that Dan Merriman, bad as he is, "wins" for delivering the most awfulest(er) of his lines with emotional levels worthy of MacBeth. Piper intentionally assembled a collection of very bad actors, subjected them to a discouraging script in the pedestrian manner of lame horror, and then provided them a visual obstacle course regularly resorting to grime, gore, bad LSD trip graphics, soft porn, and abhorrent insects. What kind of person can he possibly be? Piper has received more acclaim from some esoteric corners than he deserves, but he does at least have the occasional feel for making a horror film so bad that it's entertaining, or at least he tries such an extraordinary variation of approaches that occasionally one attains traction through some theory of randomness. I'm not sure which and it doesn't really matter since he doesn't consistently sustain interest through absurdly mundane characters, a plot that makes so little sense that it demands attention, or bad taste of such magnitude as to command respect. In fact, there's an argument to be made that, since the characters are all such pathetic variations of idiocy and lunacy, Piper's working in a milieu of hyper-realism, suffering only geographic displacement from Washington, D.C. For those perusing the cast list, incidentally, Liz Hurley isn't Elizabeth Hurley. Not that it matters much.
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