Guy (Mike Messier) is a lug. A brooding, spineless, paranoid musician and record store employee with dreams far more expansive than his talent, Guy haplessly sits back and takes it as his world collapses around him one domino at a time. Stuck working the graveyard shift at the record store means sleeping in the daytime…which is a problem since his band, “Mark David Chapman,” rehearses in the afternoons. Yet, his constant clamoring to return to the day shift merely gets his boss ticked at him, while the rest of the band threatens to kick him out because he’s always late, always sleepy, always crabby and, not incidentally, he sucks.
Guy’s only refuge from his dire existence — and the film’s lone bright spot — comes in the form of Jane (Jennifer Hayes), the sexy, spunky lead singer of another local band. Guy is initially relegated to simply lusting after Jane from afar, which he does to a rather disturbing extreme; ritualistically shaving his legs, donning clothing similar to what Jane wears, and staring at a veritable Jane photographic shrine while he, er, satisfies certain urges.
Then, when Jane unwittingly gives him an opening by tossing her panties at him from on-stage during a performance — talk about an ice breaker! — the conscientious chap heads backstage to return the trophy, in the process earning himself a casual invitation to meet her to see another band the next night. Love being the irrational critter that it is, this unlikely duo hits it off…and Jorge J. Lomastro’s listless video finally gets going.
It’s far too late by this time, however. If this film’s ponderous lethargy, set to the soundtrack of various Providence area bands and characterized by the eight painful minutes of Guy’s auto-erotic ritual we must endure before reaching the first insipid line of ad-libbed dialogue, hasn’t set the viewer to snoring yet, the mundane, done-to-death falling-in-love montages which comprise most of the rest of this story, will. That is, until the viewer reaches the stupid, utterly unmotivated, and unoriginal blood-soaked ending, which was just plain silly.
The student filmmakers behind “Man in You” tout that this might be the first feature length student project shot on digital video. If so, and if all the rest are gonna be this tedious, padded, and shoddy, I vote for this to be the last.
