Fantasia 2019: Jade’s Asylum
Right. So, I picked this movie at random, in the sense that I got the name confused with a completely different film I meant to actually see. I figured, meh, might as well watch it, it could turn out to be a fun accidental discovery!
Nope. Very nope. Categorize this as my “one scary or slasher film of the year”, for one thing. And then add it to my very small list of not-so-positive reviews. Here is, as I understand it, what the film was like. I won’t tell you what it’s about, because I still have no fucking clue.
A bunch of rich asshole men rent or buy a cabin in Costa Rica to essentially fuck local chicks and do cocaine. For some reason, one of the dudes brings his girlfriend; enter Jade. This girl is in a shitty situation with her shitty boyfriend and deals with it in a shitty way, which is to drop acid and soak in the bathtub while hallucinating that her dead father is insulting her. That sentence, quite seriously, is 80% of the fucking movie. Observe.
The film is edited out of sequence, mingling flashbacks, repeated scenes, as well as the same scenes repeated partially through a separate scene happening at the same time. And. They. Keep. Showing. Her. In. The Goddamn. Bathtub. I mean, this girl must have pruned into a 90 year old sack of skin by the time they finished filming.
Did I mention the Mushroom Men? Because yes. There are mushroom men. Or plant zombies. Or tribal mutants. They keep picking off people in the forest and either killing them, or knocking them out so they can stitch their lips together and cut off their feet. Why? I have no fucking clue. To me they seemed like they should have been a whole separate movie, instead of merging them in with this girls bad-trip and life choice issues. The conceptualization of the mushroom people was pretty cool though.
Here’s a photo of a random victim of the mushroom men. For absolutely no reason other than I could not make sense of it, and now, neither can you.
I am really struggling to understand what this writer/film maker was trying to achieve here. Because on one side, you have a pretty decent performance from the lead actor, Morgan Kohan, in the role of Jade, as she tries to deal with this awful and uncomfortable vacation, in her awful and uncomfortable life. Those scenes, including the ones where she converses with her defunct father, are, or at least could have been, somewhat interesting.
On the other side, you have clumsy scenes with the yuppy shitheads. The dialogue in these was poorly written, had questionable sound quality, and it essentially seemed like they were just an excuse to have more people to gore. This ties in the 3rd aspect of the movie, the Mushroom Men. They looked nearly invisible in the foliage, in broad daylight, so that was pretty cool. But there was zero exploration as to who or what they were, what they wanted, or why they were doing it, and why they did it in such a specific way.
The most logical answer I came up with was that we make little sense of the film because we are trapped inside Jade’s mind. I think. Fragmented, as is her psyche. And the Mushroom Men are a hallucination from the acid she dropped. Honestly, I was really hoping that her Ghost Father would somehow reveal that she was herself half-mushroom, and she would join them in the forest to murder the yuppies like one big happy mushroom family.
I was disappointed.