Terrible Thursday: Intermedio

Intermedio
Starring: Edward Furlong, Steve Railsback, Cerina Vincent, Amber Benson
Directed by: Andrew Lauer

Style: Supernatural
Blood and Guts: 2
Fright Factor: 0
Laugh Factor: 4
Weapons of choice: Crappy CGI spirits, mining tools
Overall rating: Terrible

Welcome to Terrible Thursday. This is the weekly dissection of a terrible film. Something that, if you make it through, you should get a T-Shirt or some sort of medal. Our first offering is one near and dear to my heart: Intermedio.

The movie follows four friends on an ill conceived tour of a tunnel between Mexico and the US. Ill conceived because they never quite explain why this is a good idea. Also, there are random drug dealers down there. Oh, and there is also a murderous old man who controls equally murderous spirits. Well, maybe not spirits. I would say more like poorly executed flare effects with faces on them.

One of the reasons this film is so terrible is that there never seems to be any coherent story to drive it along. These kids decide to go down into the tunnel, then decide to try and rob the drug dealers, then other things happen, and then it ends. It is so bad that when I read the synopsis online to refresh my memory for this review, I thought somebody had seen an entirely different movie. I swore the kids went down there to make a drug deal, not randomly meet drug dealers.

What's worse, Edward Furlong's character appears to be constantly out of breath, as if walking at a moderate pace could result in a combination heart attack and aneurysm. Every line he delivers requires several moments of wheezing and gasping. I kid you not. Cerina Vincent's shirt is constantly shrinking throughout the film, something the movie makers did ON PURPOSE. How cheap can you be? This is how the filmmakers show how "cool" and "self-mocking" they can be. I instead wanted to break their camera hand.

Then there are the filters. It's like the director couldn't decide whether he loved filters or whether they are things you use for making coffee. The opening scene, for example, keeps changing shades of orange because the sun was in various states of setting when they were filming. They have filters to fix that. In retrospect, maybe the director just couldn't decide what color filter he wanted to use. Whichever is worse, that was probably the reason behind it. Then, filters come out of the woodwork, with every underground tunnel feeling like some high schooler's AV project. I was waiting for some scene to be double filtered, as goodness knows there was nothing else to pay attention to in this film.

Finally, the movie ends after a gloriously craptacular death by the old man controlling the spirits (if you use digital blood, you need to be slapped). If anyone can explain the last shot to me i.e. what it means and where the characters are, I congratulate you. I sure as heck couldn't, as it is so tacked on that I expected the next shot to be the director winking at the the camera, saying "Clever, huh?"

This movie is an ordeal. It is a bane to those who stumble across it on TV late at night and don't see just how terrible it can be. Throw it into a chasm. Burn every copy. Just don't watch it.