The only thing to be gleaned from this pitiful, high school A/V club-quality production is that Busy Philips and Dominique Swain are staggeringly unathletic. There's a scene in this film where Philips' character is playing field hockey and she displays all the reflexes and coordination of physicist Stephen Hawking. There's another scene were Swain is running, just running mind you, and it looks like she was born without legs and had them sewn on 30 seconds before they started filming. Absolutely nothing else in this movie is worth a damn. It's all bad, but not interestingly or weirdly bad, just incompetent through and through.
The Smokers is about three young women at a Milwaukee boarding school. There's Karen (Busy Philips), the wild one; Lisa (Keri Lynn Pratt), the preppie one; and Jefferson (Dominique Swain), who I guess is supposed to be the cool one, though she actually has no definable personality whatsoever. After a few scenes that establish that Karen is a slut, Lisa has awful taste in men and well, nothing's ever really established about Jefferson, the three girls get a gun from Jefferson's little sister (Thora Birch) and decide they're going to start raping men at gunpoint. Believe me, it makes even less sense in the movie. The characters mouth some words that make me think one of the writers once read the dust jacket of a feminist book on sex and power, but only the dust jacket and then forgot half of what he or she read.
The film pretty quickly forgets about the whole male rape thing and instead bumbles its way through a series of poorly written, poorly acted and poorly shot rubbish involving a gay singer, a middle aged guy in a limo, premature ejaculation and a doofus who could pass for Paul from the Wonder Years if you injected him with human growth hormone.
The Smokers also features a lot of pot smoking, zero nudity and moments of violence more crudely staged than the sword fights in a 5th grade production of Romeo and Juliet. The plot is well, if you tried to diagram this story out you'd end up with an exploded labyrinth of lines going in all directions and never connecting to anything. That Swain, Philips and Birch went on to have legitimate careers after their work here is nothing short of stunning. After watching this movie, I wouldn't have believed anyone involved would have ever worked again in non-pornographic cinema. The dialog sounds like it was written by a deaf-mute. The actors somehow mange to look as if they're badly improvising their lines and badly reading them off cue cards AT THE SAME TIME. The direction has all the visual flair of a 1st trimester fetus with a cell phone camera.
Above all, The Smokers is dull. Really dull. Really, really dull. I mean "Do not operate heavy machinery after watching" dull.
Avoid this movie like you were a child molester and this film was Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC.
The Smokers is about three young women at a Milwaukee boarding school. There's Karen (Busy Philips), the wild one; Lisa (Keri Lynn Pratt), the preppie one; and Jefferson (Dominique Swain), who I guess is supposed to be the cool one, though she actually has no definable personality whatsoever. After a few scenes that establish that Karen is a slut, Lisa has awful taste in men and well, nothing's ever really established about Jefferson, the three girls get a gun from Jefferson's little sister (Thora Birch) and decide they're going to start raping men at gunpoint. Believe me, it makes even less sense in the movie. The characters mouth some words that make me think one of the writers once read the dust jacket of a feminist book on sex and power, but only the dust jacket and then forgot half of what he or she read.
The film pretty quickly forgets about the whole male rape thing and instead bumbles its way through a series of poorly written, poorly acted and poorly shot rubbish involving a gay singer, a middle aged guy in a limo, premature ejaculation and a doofus who could pass for Paul from the Wonder Years if you injected him with human growth hormone.
The Smokers also features a lot of pot smoking, zero nudity and moments of violence more crudely staged than the sword fights in a 5th grade production of Romeo and Juliet. The plot is well, if you tried to diagram this story out you'd end up with an exploded labyrinth of lines going in all directions and never connecting to anything. That Swain, Philips and Birch went on to have legitimate careers after their work here is nothing short of stunning. After watching this movie, I wouldn't have believed anyone involved would have ever worked again in non-pornographic cinema. The dialog sounds like it was written by a deaf-mute. The actors somehow mange to look as if they're badly improvising their lines and badly reading them off cue cards AT THE SAME TIME. The direction has all the visual flair of a 1st trimester fetus with a cell phone camera.
Above all, The Smokers is dull. Really dull. Really, really dull. I mean "Do not operate heavy machinery after watching" dull.
Avoid this movie like you were a child molester and this film was Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC.