"Escape From Tomorrow" will undoubtedly be the strangest movie you see this year.  Filmed guerrilla-style in both Disney World and Disneyland without obtaining permission from The Walt Disney Company, it's a bold, surreal film that is unlike anything you've ever seen before.  (For a more in-depth look at how the movie was filmed, check out this article.)

But just because a film is brave and unique doesn't necessarily make it a great piece of cinema.  In fact, I would argue that "Escape From Tomorrow" succeeds far more as an experimental work of visual art than as a movie.  When you walk out of the theater, the primary emotion you feel is admiration towards the filmmaker for essentially pulling off an elaborate heist in broad daylight on the turf of one of the most powerful companies in the world.  Your second thought will probably be something along the lines of, "What the heck did I just watch??"

What little plot there is in this bizarre 90-minute acid trip involves a man, Jim (Roy Abramsohn), on a family vacation at Disney World.  On the morning of the last day of their trip, he gets word that he's been laid off.  He keeps this news to himself in order to enjoy the final day with his wife and kids, but slowly descends into madness, complete with hallucinations of animatronic characters turning into demons.  His mental breakdown is exacerbated by his relentless pursuit of two nymphlike French girls throughout the park and the incessant nagging of his shrewish wife.  There are subplots involving washed-up princesses, weepy nurses, brainwashing, and a disease called "cat flu."  The events and themes twist and turn, going down rabbit holes both figurative and literal, until the film reaches a Lynchian level of weirdness.

"Escape From Tomorrow" has a lot going for it.  The whole movie was shot in black-in-white, a decision made for practical purposes, but one that immediately imbues the proceedings with an off-kilter atmosphere.  Seeing the normally vibrant world of Disney portrayed in washed-out shades of grey is disorienting -- it turns out that without color, fireworks look a lot like explosions.  All the people around the actors obviously have no idea they've become inadvertent extras in a movie, and their obliviousness lends the film a sense of immediacy and realism.  The natural juxtaposition of such disturbing events with such familiar and happy surroundings is a great (if easy) way to keep the audience on edge.

But as the movie goes on, a sneaking suspicion mounts that behind the daring filmmaking and bizarro images is a film that's not actually very good.  The characters are one-dimensional: Jim, who starts out with the viewers' sympathy for having lost his job, quickly throws it out the window with his lecherous leering at underaged girls; and his wife Emily (Elena Schuber) is never anything more than a screeching harpy.  What begins as a smart examination of the evil that can lurk so closely behind a friendly facade quickly devolves into a muddled pastiche of other, better mind-bending films.  As Jim's madness mounts and the line between reality and hallucination blurs, writer/director Randy Moore throws so many ideas at the wall that almost none of them stick.

That being said, no one should feel discouraged from seeing this film.  It's definitely a one-of-a-kind experience that is worth seeing for fans of the outré.  While it's true that most of the attention that "Escape From Tomorrow" has been receiving is due to the audacity of its filmmaking rather than the quality of the product, that attention is still merited.  Moore and his film deserve to be recognized for bending the often-stodgy rules of cinema and executing such a seemingly impossible task with such apparent ease.  It may be fair to say that "Escape From Tomorrow" is less fun to sit through than it is to discuss afterwards -- but that's not such a bad legacy for a film to have.  It's certainly better than a film that's fun to sit through but is immediately forgettable, isn't it?  People will assuredly be talking about, studying, and mimicking this film for years to come, so on that level it's hard to argue that it wasn't a rousing success.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nfU_5NWBoE[/youtube]