![]() ![]() The surreptitious camerawork lends a voyeuristic quality, and some slick-yet-cheesy special effects add to the cheekiness. On the downside, the editing is sometimes rough, the story often feels aimless and erratic, and the footage arbitrary during the first hour - perhaps suitably so, since Jim is a suburban slob who finds his life cast adrift. Much like David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Darren Aranofsky’s Pi (though less nuanced) the black-and-white cinematography gives it a Universal horror movie quality that adds to the nightmarish feel of the story and avoids the distracting palette garish colors associated with the park. The doing it is the best part (with terrific. The approach only adds to the low-budget surrealism that permeates Escape from Tomorrow. For Escape from Tomorrow, director Randy Moore snuck into Disney World and shot almost all of his movie there. (They go so far to suggest that the women who dress up as iconic Disney princesses work on the side as high-priced escorts for rich businessmen with cartoon kinks.) He and his cast and crew shot much of the movie guerilla-style in the park itself, leaving many to wonder if the movie could even be legally distributed since it was filmed without permission from notoriously litigious Disney and uses the company’s imagery in ways Walt would not likely have approved of. Moore’s macabre movie is not only set in the world’s most famous theme park, it was also filmed there - an impressive feat given that Disney doesn’t allow filming inside the place. Throughout these episodes, Jim pursues two young French girls (Danielle Safady and Annet Mahendru) around the park with a stalkerish intensity. Jim’s downward spiral begins quietly enough, with family bickering and minor disasters, and gradually escalates into heavy drinking, hallucinations, violent encounters, bizarre revelations, and some truly strange events not to be divulged here. As anyone who’s ever attended a child’s birthday party knows, being miserable in a place that demands cheer only makes matters worse. ![]() The film opens during the last day of their vacation to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, just as Jim receives a call from his employer informing him that he’s been terminated. Chillingly shot in black and white, ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW dissects the mythology of artificial perfection while subversively attacking our cultures. The story centers on Jim (Roy Abramsohn), a nondescript everyman with a wife, Emily (Elena Schuber), and two kids, Sara (Katelynn Rodriguez) and Elliot (Jack Dalton). It’s less of an “F- you” and more of a 90-minute noogie. One of the most impressive feats of subversive, satirical stunt film-making in years, Randy Moore’s debut feature Escape From Tomorrow bursts the saccharine-sweet bubble that is the Disney empire without resorting to mean-spiritedness, taking the notion that a shiny surface conceals an equally dark underbelly and running with it like an Olympic sprinter on amphetamines. ![]()
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