Before this I considered End of a Gun, Birdemic and Picasso Trigger to be the unholy trinity of the worst movies with no redeeming qualities but this one beat all of them to rise to the top (or drop down to the bottom in this case). Now, I rate movies in terms of enjoyment and I despise the term guilty pleasure because I love a ton of bad or cheesy movies and don't feel guilty about my love for them, I will sing the praises of Samurai Cop or Miami Connection for days if given the chance. However this one is trash, it's not so bad it's good, it's just truly and absolutely awful in every sense. I watched this in the right setting; with a friend and we both love bad movies but it was just painful to watch this garbage. We might've gotten a few chuckles out of it but for most of it we were bored out of our minds and started talking about everything else but the movie half an hour in. Afterwards we were both so resigned we contemplated giving movies altogether a break for a while but we planned to watch more and luckily the next movie which was Breakin' made us regain faith in movies and schlock. I see a lot of people loving this movie and saying it's funny and one of the best bad movies of all time and I wish I felt about it that way but instead all I feel is PTSD when I think about going back and sitting through this steaming pile of agonizing filth again.

Things. That's exactly what this movie is. A jumbled mess of obtuse things that don't fit together, being forced to co-exist in 85 minutes of sheer avant-garde brilliance. Everything about this movie is a complete enigma. The premise, the purpose, and the pretense of this movie, because it makes NO sense, it serves NO moral, and the biggest mystery is to whether the creators of this film intended to create a mocking masterpiece, or if they just fell completely steam-roller flat.The look of this film is reflective of the mindset of the film-makers involved: it's fuzzy, foolish, and downright foreign. Shot on 8mm, this Canadian epic is technically one of the worst films ever made. Everything about this movie is just wrong, from the framing, to the editing, to the sound mixing. Especially the sound mixing, because it's almost entirely dubbed, and everyone doing their lines seems completely out of their emotive mindset, it just ends up fascinating. The music is a mixture of mistaken synths melodies, airy repetition, and dastardly guitar riffs. The lighting is in eccentric Suspiria colors that vividly contrast our protagonist's blue sweater. The editing is jumpy, the shots linger far too long on people struggling to accomplish a relatively simple task such as putting on a shirt, or wiping off blood and goo with paper towels. It's only natural that the cast and crew had no idea how to film a regular movie, because they can barely dress themselves. Yet all this transcends typical technical inferiority and surmounts to something mesmerizing. A true testament to Canadian film-making.The plot involves things, and characters who encounter things, and unenthused conflicts brought about by things. After things start appearing, it becomes a survival story in the vein of The Evil Dead, only less coherent, less logical, and with a lot more beer and filler. Nearly half of this movie contains scenes that further the plot in absolutely no way, and sometimes even twist the story into a complete knot. Describing the story of Things is one of the toughest challenges mankind has faced, because the premise has yet to be deciphered. So when one wants to know about Things, it all boils down to a mustached mullet man in a blue sweater fighting off giant rubbery ants after his spectacle-wearing brother's wife gives birth to said things after having been artificially-inseminated by a satanic scientist... or something.Things is a strange case of the worst ingredients forming a completely happy accident. You have to be in a strange place to enjoy this movie, because it's so bad... it's beautiful. Some movies are described as nightmares on film, but most films are too coherent, or structurally sound, to encompass a true nightmare. A real nightmare makes no sense, and takes you from one place to another, so fluidly, that you don't even realize you're going there until you suddenly find yourself at that place. This is Things. A surreal mess of incompetent creatures and uncordial catastrophes, that you'll never truly understand, even after you have just experienced Things.

OK it's late and I don't have the energy to do it justice, but I am committed to telling the world about the 'Things' screening in Toronto this past Saturday. In case you didn't hear Things is the most hilariously incompetent and berserk movie ever made in Canada (NOT the worst though - that honor goes to 'Caged Terror' - competence isn't everything) and possibly the universe. It is mostly shot on Super 8 and basically involves some hosers drinking beer and wandering around the house. They are occasionally interrupted by an inert papier-mache ant with fangs - it doesn't seem to bother anyone too much that it ate its way out of one of the guys' wife's stomach - and 'newscasts' of moonlighting pornstar Amber Lynn reading cue cards WAY off to the side somewhere. There is one scene where a guy silently waves a flashlight around a bathroom for ten full minutes. Dialogue includes "Next time we go somewhere together I'm leaving you at home!" and "Does a toilet flush during a blackout?" Star Ray TV's legendary Jan Pachul shows up as some kind of 'mad scientist' and trumps everyone with his skeezing hyperbolic delivery even though he's basically playing the same mullet-headed boob as all the others. You can not believe that this thing cost two months and $30,000 to make. They must have bought a lot of beer! But the real show was the guys themselves. Most of the crew showed up for this, the 19 1/2 anniversary screening - which they said was the first time they ever saw it with an audience! The director was a modest soft-spoken guy, but the co-writer/'star' was very stoned and just could not shut up. He seemed to alternate between embarrassed, pre-emptive defensiveness and attempted good-natured embrace of the audience's howling contempt for their work - signified by him going "HEHHEH" very short and sharp and loud about every thirty seconds during the movie. When Trash Palace proprietor Stacey Case paused the tape for intermission Gillis insisted on telling everyone how much better it was about to get. (It really really didn't.) After the movie he took to the stage and wouldn't let it go; he talked so much no one could start the Q & A, and when the director gave it a shot he talked over HIM. He repeatedly promised to give everyone an autographed DVD (with extras!!) and to interview people for a 'documentary' they were going to do about the movie. Unfortunately both were sidetracked when - AFTER the movie had been over for about ten minutes - they went to turn the camera on and couldn't get it to work. Instead we got to watch three of these guys torture the camera in the corner for perhaps fifteen minutes while Stacey tried desperately to fill up the space. Finally the guy - who had been moaning about the turnout intermittently all night - stood on the stairs and yelled something to the effect of, "I mean I don't HATE Stacey, he's gotta make a living..." at which point the heretofore mesmerized audience came to the collective realization that they might actually never ever get out of there alive, so I did everyone a favour and started making strong ready-to-go gestures like standing up and putting on my backpack. Fortunately the stars all suddenly went out for a smoke which gave us a chance to declare the evening officially over.Marijuana is a hell of a drug. I feel privileged to have been a part of this event - now "Things" will have new layers of meaning every time I watch it, which I expect will be once or twice a year for the rest of my life. (And for the record, the free DVDs did happen, after I left...peace Barry!)

THINGS is notable mostly as a curio, being the mainstream(?) film launchpad of blue movie queen Amber Lynn. So popular was she in the jizz biz, it seemed inevitable that she'd do a non-sexual role. Well...in this stultifying mess, Amber demonstrates that she is, indeed, able to read(!). Her participation consists entirely of prerecorded video footage which features her as a news anchor, reporting a number of random idiocies on a t.v. in the house where this "movie" takes place. She looks just as if she were on a porn set, and reads blankly from a cue-card at the side of the camera(after suffering through a few moments of this, you'll be praying for Ron Jeremy to enter the scene and shovel his hairy business into her flapping maw just to keep her silent).What we're offered, besides the dramatic marvels of Ms. Lynn, is badly shot footage(sans synchronized sound)of drunk morons in a trashy house spouting bits of witless dialog, and a woman in the bedroom who dies while giving birth to several immobile paper-mache bugs that look like baked hams with spindly legs and fangs. That's about all I can say for certain, as THINGS is so unfathomably disjointed and illogically conceived. Sadly, I have little doubt that some will actually find reason to praise this garbage as some sort of "art brut" masterpiece, rhapsodizing with masturbatory ardor over its disorienting surreal quality and experimental concrete minimalism. God help them.1/10...a legitimate contender for "all time worst" accolades.