ArcaMax

"Crumb Catcher," a first feature by writer-director Chris Skotchdopole that's being ushered into the world by low-budget filmmaking eminence Larry Fessenden, has a vaguely familiar feel. There's a nasty buzz to the plot and the performances that recalls old bad-vibes character studies like "The Last Seduction" and "The Honeymoon Killers," and while this movie may never again be mentioned in the vicinity of those lower-depths classics, the people who made it will likely be back with further work.

The story begins at a wedding in which the bride and groom, Leah and Shane (Ella Rae Peck and Rigo Garay), are already bickering. They can't even coordinate their how-we-met story for an inquiring photographer, and when Shane says that Leah works for him, she immediately shoots him down: Shane is a writer, she explains, while she works in publishing. In fact, she works for the company that's about to publish Shane's first novel. Neither of them seems very gratified by their good fortune -- their professional success or their newly forged marital union. The next morning, Shane wakes up in his hotel bed, very hungover and still in his wedding clothes from the night before. What happened? Whatever. Soon he and Leah are off on their honeymoon, having been loaned a sleek vacation home in the woods of upstate New York.

Yes, this is a remote-house-in-the-woods movie, sort of, and it gets off to a good creepy start with the late-night arrival of John (John Speredakos), an obnoxious waiter who worked Leah and Shane's wedding with his bartending wife Rose (Lorraine Farris). Out of nowhere, John has brought the newlyweds their wedding cake, which hadn't arrived on time the day before. He has also brought the surly Rose along, and they have both brought a business proposition -- an opportunity to finance the commercial launch of an invention John has come up with, a gizmo called a "crumb catcher," which will "revolutionize the dining experience." All it will cost them to get in on the ground floor of this can't-miss venture is $50,000. And the older couple -- who think Leah and Shane are wealthy -- wants it right now.

So far so good. The movie has established the premature fissures in Leah and Shane's newly minted marriage, and Peck and Garay do a solid job of projecting the couple's awkward unease with one another. And in the character of John, with his braying bonhomie and weird hair (it looks like it's been chewed at by rats), Skotchdopole has illuminated a repulsive social archetype -- the very bad person who can prevail against good people by figuratively running them over. Speredakos, who I would hate to think is doing anything other than acting, nails this sociopath with alarming force.

The movie should work better than it does. The cinematography, by low-light ace Adam Carboni, and the obscurely attributed score (one scene sizzles with what sounds like a chopstick tattoo on an empty fried-rice carton) are notably effective. And the story's structure has an engaging clarity, with the two marriages mirroring each other -- bickering John and Rose at the end of their long connubial road and Shane and Leah just starting out on their own forced march. What the picture also has, unfortunately, is a pretty big MacGuffin problem. If you're hooking your story on a purportedly brilliant mechanical device -- something the world doesn't realize it's been hungrily awaiting -- then that device had better actually be brilliant, or at least plausible. The one we see here -- John's "crumb catcher" -- is a preposterous gadget that answers no human need, even the eternal lust for novelty. If that's intentional -- if the movie only wants to show us what clueless boobs John and Rose are -- well, we can figure that out for ourselves.

========

To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

Copyright 2024 Creators Syndicate, Inc.