I’m all for experimental. Hell, I’m all for the whole “so ridiculous it’s wonderful” thing too. What I’m not in for is absolute gibberish, filmed with a video camera, and then passed off as a “narrative” when the only thing holding anything together is a loosely-written voiceover.
Such is Guiseppe Andrews’ latest endeavor, “Schoof.” For a plot, the film posits that there’s his weird cosmic force, called schoof, that is making people in a small trailer park behave oddly. The narrator of the piece is constantly seen practicing her cheerleading in a random parking lot (and, oddly enough, has a 25 foot clit), there are cowboy orgies in a vaccuum cleaner (and an attempted one at a beach-side hotel) and other gibberish too annoying or nonsensical to mention.
I can be down with this type of picture and truth be told, “Schoof,” on sheer shake-your-head audacity, had me for the first ten minutes. But that’s it. The fact that the film runs upwards of a scant seventy minutes and feels like four hours, especially with no real point or focus, just gves the impression that random footage was thrown into the “cut” willy-nilly, then “explained” via voiceover.
I read that Guiseppe Andrews had made 23 features from his trailer park environs, and to that I can only ask, “what is the definition of feature?” If it’s running time then, sure, I truly believe that. If it’s based on actual plot structure, executed narrative… then I haven’t see the other 22 (and based on what I read, neither have his many “actors”), but strike “Schoof” from that list.
