Vacation!

Vacation!

*

Reviewed by: Scott Macdonald

Four young girl-friends take time off work to go on holiday to a house by the beach. ("This place is awesome! It's pink.") They drink pina coladas. They dismiss the local dimwitted surfer dude. Realising how boring their holiday is, ("We shoulda brought drugs!", one of them whines) they score some LSD. During a trip, one of them drowns. The remaining girls chuck the body in the sea. End of. All of this plot is given away by a newspaper report at the start of the film. This plot takes an interminable amount of time to get going; its telling is slower than a turtle crawling through treacle.

The four actresses (and The Surfer) are woeful performers, never once convincing as long-term friends. They show no skill at acting or performing, and play dreadfully dull characters. Their overall personalities are nigh-on indistinguishable, one's a bisexual and another a lesbian. All are scatter-brained ninnies. All that's showing on the TV is an infomercial channel for a laxative, 1-800-BWL-CLNZ - "So clogged up, with misery". How apt. A colonoscopy would be more interesting than watching this stream of thin cinematic diahorrea.

Copy picture

LSD has at least been partially responsible for some classic pop-art, but the girls' trip and subsequent flashbacks are (here's that word again!) BORING. It's colourful, draped in pastels and has some occasionally interesting visuals. And it has a decent joke in there - ("Do you ever think about Suicide?" - "Sure, their second album is great!") But it's so slow. There's a 20 minute short in the entire picture, squeezed into something four times the length.

It's clear that writer/director/editor Zach Clark likes boobs. So do I. In trashy cinema, they're like chocolate sprinkles on a really good bit of heart-clogging pleasure food. And the girls do have very nice boobs - we see them occasionally.

I hated this movie. It's inarticulate and zero-dimensional; I spent over 30 minutes without taking a single note, waiting for something interesting to happen. There is one scene that almost works - one of the girls has a private confessional to the corpse, asking for forgiveness. For the rest of it, I feel that I'm missing something obvious, something right in front of me, a primer that would help me get it. As is, I reckon that the audience is the joke.

This is one of the most stunningly banal films I have seen in decades; one of the most inept bags of garbage that was ever shat into oblivion; one that makes me wish that Eye For Film had a zero star rating. Edward D Wood Jr, your time has finally come. At least his films weren't utterly boring.

Reviewed on: 24 Jun 2010
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Four young friends go on a trip to the seaside.
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Director: Zach Clark

Writer: Zach Clark

Starring: Trieste Kelly Dunn, Lydia Hyslop, Maggie Ross, Melodie Sisk, Michael Abbott Jr, Tara Everhart, Martha Stephens, Tony Greenberg, Ellie Nicoll

Year: 2010

Runtime: 90 minutes

Country: US


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