A murdered medical student returns from beyond the grave to stop a serial killer from murdering again during a psychology experiment held by two current medical students on the grounds of the medical research corporation at which they intern. Also, a folded towel, a ceiling fan with two bulbs missing, four sheets of paper taped to the siding of a house and a hand-written note about a dormitory’s new recycling bins. The disease is in its beginning stage. The signs of the disease are minimal.
It is difficult to know where to begin when speaking of After Last Season, an inscrutable multimedia work that might charitably be described as a movie. Intended by all accounts to be a more or less straight forward genre film, After Last Season is instead defiantly bizarre, from its obscure modern art opening through to its prosaic final line, “We have a room next to the living room.” It is not an easy piece of media to classify.
A confounding lack of anything resembling traditional production value inevitably dominates first impressions. After Last Season was financed on the (very) cheap (despite a quoted final cost of as much as $5 million, the initial shooting budget is said to have amounted to around $40,000) and shot, against all fiscal reason, on 35mm film. Indeed, the union cast, crew, and raw stock and camera rental must have eaten up most, if not all, of the film’s initial resources. This is implied heavily by the final product, in which most of the sets are dressed (where they are dressed at all) in loose sheets of printer paper, cardboard, and off-the-shelf white tablecloths. Some interiors are filmed in real homes with no observable effort towards staging. One repeated mid-film exterior offers a truly quizzical compromise: a view of the side of a home, utterly ordinary save for the four pieces of blank paper that are conspicuously taped to it.
One might well ask why, but neither the film nor its makers are offering answers.
The writing, also by Mark Region, is meandering and obscure. There is no obvious plot, no particular narrative direction. There are characters, but they spend the majority of their appearances embroiled in generalized small talk (“I’ve never been to that town, but I’ve been through it.”) that rarely touches upon the events of the film. Sometimes things happen: A woman walks through a hallway. A man lies on the floor, stabbed. An FBI agent gets an MRI scan as part of his treatment for Parkinson’s disease. A pair of medical students learn about the differences between dopamine blockers and SSRIs. A ghost tries to pick up a backpack.
The story, near as I was able to glean from my pair of viewings, is as written above: A murdered medical student returns from beyond the grave to stop a serial killer from murdering again during a psychology experiment held by two current medical students on the grounds of the medical research corporation at which they intern. Whether or not this is what the film is about is impossible for me to say, and the telling of these elements is, as with the rest of After Last Season, non-traditional.
The focal point, such as there is one, is on medical students Sarah (Peggy Mcclellan) and Matthew (Jason Kulas, who continues to act and currently moderates the film’s facebook fan page), who appear to be in residency at a hospital (though Sarah contradicts this during a phone call with… someone?… later in the film), under the auspices of Dr. John Marlen (the late Scott Winters), and also intern at the Prorolis Corporation, a medical technology company. At the hospital, Sarah and Matthew take in a low-key lecture about schizophrenia, its treatments, and the diagnostic application of MRI exams (the MRI machine, prominently featured and brutally constructed of cardboard and tape, deserves a supporting credit on its own). At the end of this Dr. Marlen makes an offhand remark about a particular patient who believed she heard the voice of a dead man. This is perhaps the only example of the film making an obvious, observable attempt to set up a future plot element.
Within the hallowed brick and cardboard halls of the Prorolis Corproation Sarah and Matthew conduct a pair of psychological exercises. The first appears, initially, to be central to the plot: through a pair of experimental chips Matthew is able to see Sarah’s thoughts, as prompted by a questionnaire. As the exercise progresses Sarah’s visions (related via several uncut minutes of rudimentary CGI) become more clarified and complex, and are invaded by the mysterious, obscured figure of a man who may be responsible for a spate of recent homicides. The pair witness, through Sarah’s mind, an attempted killing in a nearby home, and are then attacked in their conference room by the same knife-wielding man – now invisible. Matthew screams: “The chair! The chair next to the wall!”
…and then snaps awake. The prior exercise, the chips, the visions, the killer, all were but a dream. Sarah stands by, bemusedly perplexed (I sympathize), and after some small talk the real experiment, a decidedly non-fantasized question / answer exercise, begins. Sarah asks Matthew what sort of car he’d buy, what he’d change about his actions over the last forty-eight hours, whether he flies in his dreams. A commotion outside their meeting room disturbs them, and the killer is revealed to be very real indeed (albeit not invisible). He stalks into the meeting room, knife held awkward and high, only to be cursorily dispatched by a flying folding chair. An invisible presence speaks. It is Craig (actor and professional stand-in Gregory Seymore), the disembodied spirit of a young man stabbed sometime before. Sarah and Matthew know his name. I do not know how. The three speak about Craig’s experiences, his death, and he demonstrates the difficulty he has interacting with the physical world. “The bag is too heavy. I can’t hold onto it. I can lift the ruler.” And then, Craig is gone.
In the aftermath Sarah and Matthew go back to their regular lives, the former assisting at the hospital, the latter continuing his research at the Prorolis Corporation. A coat falls off the wall behind Matthew, suggesting (or maybe not) that Craig may still be there. An FBI agent, the Parkinson’s patient from the beginning of the film, talks on the phone to… someone?… about why the killer, now locked in ‘Cell 1’ at an undisclosed location, was at the Prorolis Corporation. The wife of Dr. John Marlen shows her friend, a patient at the hospital (we see two of her appointments in the infamous MRI room), around their new home. They talk about a new strip mall, and the friend looks at a few family photos (each turned, curiously, to face a wall). It is revealed that Craig was Dr. Marlen’s son, a promising medical student cut down by the killer well before his time. “We have a room next to the living room.” End.
What does it all mean? I have no idea. Region offers a horde of connecting threads – an FBI man who gets an MRI at the beginning of the film returns at the end to interrogate the killer, an invisible killer appears in a dream before the killer is subdued by an invisible ghost, Matthew screams about a chair in his dream before the killer is subdued by one, Sarah’s roommate operates the MRI machine, a woman recovering from a neurological injury is friends with the mother of the ghost – but they coalesce less into a story than they do a Pepe Silvia thought board. Efforts to derive meaning are further undermined by an overwhelming emphasis on seemingly meaningless trivialities. A friend of Sarah’s roommate is found to be allergic to shrimp. Matthew talks on the phone about a town known for its hot mineral springs. Craig’s mother explains her home renovations. A sign states that a dormitory has new recycling bins. It goes on and on and on.
Further complicating matters is the trifecta of direction, cinematography, and editing (the latter credited not to Region, but to Vincent Grass, who has no further credits). From statements by the cast themselves we know that Region gave very little in the way of direction during the film’s week-long shoot, and did no more than a single take for most scenes. Relying on individual takes is ludicrous from any film production standpoint, but all the more for a shoot done on film, where lab errors or accidental exposure can easily leave you with no footage to fall back on. I can only imagine that, with so much of his initial funding tied up in raw film stock, Region might literally have been counting the feet before his budget ran dry.
Whatever his own reasoning for his peculiar, nigh negligent methodology, the results are very much on-screen. The cast present as what they are – actors at a loss for context, performing with little direction and often without their scene partner, trying their best to “get it right” in a single take. The camera is confused, unfocused, erratic. It lags badly behind the actions of the ill-marked cast and frames them thoughtlessly against the paltry backdrops of exposed brick and cardboard and blank paper. Some, though by no means most, of this could have been mitigated in editing, but here again After Last Season stumbles.
If someone were to tell me that Region put every frame he shot into the final cut of this film I would be hard pressed not to believe them. Actors flub lines and restart their takes, stand idle before the “Action!” call, and wonder in a visible, confused silence at whether a take is over or not. On-set discipline appears to have been non-existent. During one dialogue scene an offscreen someone noisily stands up, walks off, and casually slams a door behind them, a disruption Peggy Mcclellan tries, and fails, to ignore as she continues her performance. In the opening scene, someone farts. It’s all just there, uncut and unfiltered and pasted together with strange unpeopled detail shots of ceiling fans and signs with arrows pointing nowhere and thermostats and floor lamps and refrigerator doors and shelves… Rarely, if ever, has a finished and theatrically-released film tried so little and failed so spectacularly to communicate itself.
After Last Season is often prefaced as “the worst film ever made”, a designation I can’t really agree with. I feel that qualifying it as such ignores some of the truly awful, genuinely harmful things that have been created since motion pictures first began. This is no Triumph of the Will level humanitarian slight, it wasn’t produced by a sexual predator, no one died in-process due to lack of oversight. And yes, I am a pedant.
That said, After Last Season is absolutely one of the worst-made films ever, and anyone looking to argue otherwise would need some shocking proofs in their corner. There are plenty of films out there offering their variously deficit productions to bemused niches of “bad movie” fans, but few offer them the near total dereliction of filmmaking responsibilities that this film does. Whether embarrassed by what he made or genuinely hurt by the reception After Last Season received and continues to receive, both Mark Region and his feature have seemingly been removed from circulation. Poof. Like a ghost that has trouble carrying a backpack, they’re gone. The only home media release of the film (Region’s self-released dvd) is long out of print and vanishingly hard to come by, and it has appeared on no streaming services in nearly a decade and a half.
More’s the pity. After Last Season would likely never have been another The Room, shorn as it is of that film’s central maniacal hubris – the vanity of Tommy Wiseau is as accessible and exploitable an angle as can be had. But there is a hubris at work here all the same, of the naive sort that prevented Mark Region from realizing how deeply in over his head he was as a filmmaker even as the nitrogen started bubbling in his veins. After Last Season is terrible moviemaking in a rarefied sense. It is the one great work of a generational anti-talent; it is Mark Region’s philosopher’s stone. It is difficult and painful and wholly inexplicable, and it is perhaps the one film above all others that you, in your life, must see.
