+ Best Low-Budget Movie of the Year
 |
| An iconic Mickey Mouse hand drenched in blood invite audiences to Randy Moore's Escape from Tomorrow |
A severely dysfunctional nuclear family are on family holiday to Disney World in Florida. The man of the family gets fired from his job over the phone, just before their very strange 'adventure' in the park is about to begin ...
Escape from Tomorrow is the very strange B/W debut of writer-director Randy Moore. It shows in a nightmarish fashion a middle-aged family man's winding up in a cul-de-sac in his own family in a surreal Disney theme park. Whether each audience member recognizes this or sympathizes with him in any way is highly individually determined.
The four main parts are extremely well-cast: Jack Dalton (Tiny Warriors (2014), short) and Katelynn Rodriguez (I Am Death (2013)) as the children and especially Elena Schuber (American Horror Story (2011), TV-series) and Roy Abramsohn (Jurassic School (2017)) are outstanding as the parent couple, who truly showcase a failed marriage for audiences of Escape from Tomorrow.
The film lives on a dynamic that often results in laughter, because it is well-observed and edgy, and on its nightmarishly unreal horror element. The surreal elements in Disney World are cultivated as a modern nightmare, and for someone who is fascinated by theme parks (as me), this is alluring and impressively achieved. Regrettably the plot suffers under too many too dissimilar elements (a cat flu, a witch, an alternate reality, to name some of them.) The film also vacillates between downright beautifully captured sequences (cinematographer Lucas Lee Graham (Suburban Gothic (2014)), some with spooky effects, and others that look amateurishly poor: SPOILER The green screen scenes and the witch scene in the hotel room made me wonder if it was technically bad on purpose?
The first approximately 50 minutes of Escape from Tomorrow are really good and highly
unusual.
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Cost: 0.65 mil. $
Box office: 171k $ (North America only)
= Uncertainty (but looks like a mega-flop)
[Escape from Tomorrow premiered 18 January (Sundance) and runs 90 minutes. Moore's father would often take him to Disney World after divorcing his mother. Father and son later stopped talking. Moore would himself as a father take his own family to Disneyland in LA and relive strange father memories, as well as getting disturbed input from his nurse wife, who formerly lived in the Soviet Union. He put together the film's financing through an inheritance from his grandparents. Filming took place in Disney World Florida and in Disneyland LA without Disney's knowledge with simple Canon 5OS cameras. The production had the script only on their phones and rehearsed and prepared elsewhere and kept takes to a minimum so as not to alert park employees as to their project. Shooting involved taking the same rides for hours, but the parks did not notice what was going on. Moore took the footage with him to South Korea for post production, keeping the secret from some friends in order for Disney not to find out. Sundance accepted the film for screening but did not publicize that it was about Disney. Audiences, critics and the filmmakers speculated and feared the giant company's reaction to the film, but Disney - probably choosing the wisest course, - ignored Escape from Tomorrow and let it fizz out by itself, which it did. It opened #44 in 30 theaters to a 63k $ first weekend in North America, where it only declined from then, and no other markets have grosses public. It played at a few European festivals and in Japan. Moore does not have another project public, - perhaps he is shooting it in secret right now? - but Film Excess would be curious to see his next cinematic expression. Escape from Tomorrow is rotten at 56 % with a 6.1 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Escape from Tomorrow?
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