Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jorge Torres-Torres
Starring: Sam Main, Yana Bondar, Dain Marx, Eddy Lezama
In the golden age of exploitation filmmaking, the 1970s, b-movie makers
would often capture footage of carnivals, parades and other such mass
gatherings as a cheap way of adding production value, and an unwitting cast
of thousands, to their otherwise threadbare films. With
Night of the Rumpus, director Jorge Torres-Torres takes a leaf from the guerilla
filmmaking manual, setting his lo-fi monster movie amid Athens, Georgia's
annual hipster celebration, The Wild Rumpus.
Trouble is, Torres-Torres can't find a worthwhile story in which to insert
the footage of mass revelry he's captured on the sly. The bare bones plot
tells us that at the previous year's Wild Rumpus a young woman was found
murdered, and the chief suspect, a struggling local musician known as Scary
Joe, was released after questioning.
A year later, with this year's Wild Rumpus about to kick off, the dead
girl's surviving lover, Alice, still believes Joe is responsible and is
determined to confront him. Meanwhile, a creature has formed from a
combination of toxic military waste and a discarded used contraceptive
tossed into the local river. Growing to full adult size over the course of a
day, the creature heads downtown to the site of the Wild Rumpus to claim
some victims.
Night of the Rumpus boasts as schlocky a premise as you could
imagine, but Torres-Torres appears to have greater ambitions for his film
than a mere bit of six-pack Saturday night entertainment. Much of the movie
plays like a throwback to '90s era Linklater, as we spend an interminable
amount of time in the company of aging hipsters and slackers. But none of
them are remotely interesting to spend time with, and aside from Alice,
they're an irritating and affected bunch, none more so than an investigating
journalism student who dresses like Little Red Riding Hood for no apparent
reason, and who vanishes before her subplot has even begun.
A combination of sloppy, unfoccussed camerawork and an irritating
soundtrack of loud guitar dirges makes
Night of the Rumpus something of a sensory endurance test.
Torres-Torres seems determined to test our patience and resolve, and in
discarding what limited setup his film initially offered in favour of
rambling, nonsensical vignettes, he seems to have lost patience with his own
film at some point in the production. I'm not sure if the Wild Rumpus gave
the production permission to film, but they can't be happy with this
representation of their annual shindig.
