dir: Nathaniel Warsh
"This has the bacony stink of Canada all over it." - Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Final Sacrifice
This is one of those amateur terrible films that is so much less compelling that you expect. It's a low-budget film from writer and director Nataniel Warsh about a reality-show tv producer who ends up being kidnapped by a crazy woman for a reality web series by his jealous friend. The main purported thrust of the film is "don't be an asshole." But, by the end, it's "crazy bitches are crazy."
Spencer is the womanizing hotshot tv producer who is an asshole to his friends and everybody else. How do we know he's an asshole? His greasy, shoulder-length hair. Oh, and he ignores his friend who is trying to pitch him a new television show idea, and won't take No for an answer. Oh, and he lets women molest him in his limo.
One night, Spencer finds a strange woman in his driveway, and invites her in for a round of videotaped hot fucking before unceremoniously kicking her out into the night. But, she somehow takes the tape without him noticing, works her way back into the house, and ties him up before exposing him as the asshole he is. Later, we all find out that this is under the guise of a stupid web reality series focusing on destroying people from the earlier friend. The girl had been phone fucking Spencer, causing Spencer to change his number, before she was hired by the friend to be the psychotic kidnapper. In the end, the girl actually is crazy, kidnapping Spencer and also murdering his friend.
The movie could have been some sort of transgressive screed against the media, if only it were good. Or not nearly as regressive as it actually is. Night Vision could have been in the satirical vein of Series 7: The Contenders, but it takes itself far too seriously, and with no actual returns. The cinematography is soap opera awful, the lighting is soap opera bright, the acting is community theater, the writing is perversely obvious, the continuity problems are LEGION, and the movie is, overall, a chauvinistic exercise in stupidity.
I could go on about how the post-sex cleaning process - where Spencer puts his hair up in a ponytail, brushes his teeth, THEN decides to take a shower - is representative of the ineptitude of the movie. Or, about the post-sex sequence where Spencer's shirt constantly goes from wide-open unbuttoned to 3 buttons up. Or, the his hair magically going from shoulder length and greasy to up in a pony tail on his way from the kitchen to the bathroom. But, that would be shallow and petty.
Instead, it is deeper to talk about Nathaniel Warsh's obvious hatred of women in this movie that doesn't have enough sex or wit to qualify for a Skinemax softcore porno. Warsh has an obvious problem with women and men who have egos. In Night Vision, he created a beta-male fantasy in which he uses the crazy women of his nightmares to exact revenge on the egotistical assholes of his realities. Alison is a crazy deceptive manipulative woman who gets her way with everybody she encounters. She finds sadistic pleasure in torturing Spencer while he's tied up and has severe emotional problems.
I think Warsh thinks he's creating some sort of subversive horror movie where men are the victim, and women get to be the psycho, but the woman is so obviously crazy in such a cliched way that the whole movie comes off as a brotastic bitches b crazy style movie. Instead of subverting the usual cliches that surround the kidnapping horror genre, Warsh falls into every trap that has ever existed for the psycho woman genre.
If the whole purpose of this movie was to show that Warsh could get a job on the set of Days of our Lives, perhaps the movie is a success as its never sub-80s awful. It's merely just terrible. But, the woman hating nature of Night Vision would lead me to be very very cautious about hiring Nathaniel Warsh for any job. It is kind of gross.
