If you haven't heard of Zyzzyx Road, and you're a cinephile, you might not be as in tune with the cinematic zeitgeist as you think you are.
Okay okay ... perhaps a true cinephile, in the snobbiest sense of that word, prefers to spend their energies thinking about Ingmar Bergman and only the very best of what deigns to be made after 1978. But that sort of cinephile doesn't interest me. I vibe better with the cinephile omnivores, who see the good and the bad, the well-known and the obscure, the big box office achievers and ... the Zyzzyx Roads.
Yes, John Penney's 2006 film is known to us for box office reasons, which I'll get into in just a moment. It also should well and truly fall into the "the bad" end of the above listed duality, but ... I kind of liked it actually. In the end I chickened out on a positive star rating and ended up at 2.5, but that's far, far better than I expected it would be, given the unique box office feat it achieved.
Zyzzyx Road has the distinction of being considered, by most metrics, the worst performer of all time at the U.S. box office.
Due to the desire by star Leo Grillo (who?) to open the film in foreign markets before it was opened domestically, but also his need to fulfill a requirement by the Screen Actors Guild for U.S. releases of low-budget independent films, the film played for one week, every day at noon, at the Highland Park Village Theater in Dallas, Texas, straddling the end of February and beginning of March, 2006.
Where it made $30.
The actual net gross was $20, because Grillo refunded two tickets purchased by the film's makeup artist and her friend. So only four disinterested audience members, if my math is correct, paid to see the film on its theatrical release.
Maybe they're the true cinephiles.
This made Zyzzyx Road the lowest grossing film in U.S. history, with all sorts of asterisks that have subsequently cropped up that I don't want to get into here. (The 2011 movie The Worst Movie Ever Made also has some dubious claim to this title.)
Lest we shed a tear for Grillo, Penney, and the only two other actors in the film, the far better known Tom Sizemore and Katherine Heigl, the film ultimately made $368,000 by the end of 2006 on DVD releases in 23 other countries -- and some person with a wicked sense of humor saw it fit to make a collector's edition, whose poster I just had to include above.
It's a tight little setup for a movie, and the execution is not bad either.
We open on Grillo's Grant and Heigl's Marissa driving in a car out in the desert with a body in their trunk. At least they think it's merely a body. Grant believes he killed Marissa's abusive (ex?) boyfriend, Joey (Sizemore), when he knocked him over the head after Joey stormed into the motel room where they were having a tryst. But if this were just a movie about burying a body in the desert, that would probably not sustain the relatively brief 85-minute running time. (IMDB says it's 90, but I think this is just a case of hand-wavey rounding up -- the version on YouTube, which was the only place I could find it, is surely complete, and it was only 85 minutes.)
When they pull off onto obscure Zyzzyx Road -- a real road that serves as a landmark on the drive between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, which anyone who has done that drive knows about, making this a zeitgeist movie in a second way -- and open the trunk to start their business, a few minutes later they notice that Joey is no longer there. Thus begins a cat and mouse game in which Joey's lifelessness or lack thereof is not the only assumption we should question.
We should also make no mistake about the cinematic tools used to make Zyzzyx Road. "Low budget" is certainly an accurate way to describe this movie, as it looks skuzzy for reasons that don't just have to do with the quality of the copy I watched on YouTube. This was always a movie made for dirt cheap, requiring only a single patch of desert to film it (and mostly at night), and a crew that needn't have comprised more than a few people. The presence of Sizemore and Heigl, who were already established actors at this point (of course Sizemore was, but Heigl also had credits dating all the way back to 1992), indicates some sort of pull that Grillo or Penney must have had. (It doesn't say Grillo was also a producer on IMDB, but what else explains the fact that he had a say in its distribution?)
But in starting to praise the movie a bit, the performances are all good, and I especially liked Grillo, who looks like just the everyman this story calls for. His normal-sizedness would not play in all roles -- and he is, in a way, the opposite of the man whose last name is literally Size More -- but here it is just the ticket. We do imagine that this is what we might be forced to do if we had a wife and kids but were just caught by a jealous boyfriend having sex with a woman who might actually just be a teenaged girl.
The writing is all fine, no lines of dialogue stand out for being amateurish, and the logical moments that would occur in a scenario like this are all reasonably explored and played out as they might actually occur. Then there are some illogical moments, narrative flights of fancy, just to mix things up. Let's just say that there are moments when Penney defies his small budget with a few techniques that you wouldn't see coming. It starts not to be possible to take what's happening purely at face value, and that actually happens more than once in this relatively brief narrative. Instead of playing as gimmicky misfires, these play as interesting choices. Maybe not super interesting, but interesting.
I think the thing is, when you watch a movie renowned for its complete failure at the box office -- albeit in conditions that were stacked against it from the start -- you expect it to be far, far worse than Zyzzyx Road. And to be sure, movies with a much higher box office, but which comprises a much lower percentage of their budget, are much bigger failures in a proper consideration of that term.
Really, Zyzzyx Road is just a movie that always probably should have been straight to video, in which case it would have been a perfectly fine way to spend an evening, especially if you were sick or something.
Because it reached the zeitgeist in the way it did, though, it has ultimately been seen by a lot more people, who saw it for the same reasons I just saw it. And that is a far better -- and more deserving, as it turns out -- fate for it in the end.
One final thought about Zyzzyx Road, which makes it of particular significance to a list maker like me. There is now almost no possibility -- short of a ZZ Top biopic -- that I will ever see a movie with a title that can be alphabetized after this one. For almost 15 years, Cy Endfield's Zulu has been the last movie on my big movie list, but now it's Zyzzyx Road -- and will likely continue be so, forever and ever amen.
I'll be back in October with the penultimate one of these.
No comments:
Post a Comment