By JEFF SZPIRGLAS
Starring Matt Felmlee, Loreal Steiner, and Jeff Tatum
Written and Directed by James Groetsch, Shawn Korby and Bill Weiss
Visual Vengeance
As the triumvirate of filmmakers behind 1990’s THE WRONG DOOR acknowledged in the making-of doc, getting a movie produced today is a far easier endeavor now that we have access to digital tools to shoot, store footage, and edit. And while cheaper video options were available in the late ’80s, for directors James Groetsch, Shawn Korby and Bill Weiss, a trio of recently graduated film students found it easier to work in the more tactile medium of actual film.
What they came up with was a story based on the concept of looking in the rear-view mirror of your car and finding a corpse in the backseat. It’s a great idea for a film. The trick is that you need to build a fully functioning narrative around it. Sadly, THE WRONG DOOR isn’t that film, but gosh darn it, you know these guys tried their best to pad out a feature and get it released. Most of the pleasure that stems from THE WRONG DOOR has much to do with understanding the goal and watching these players shoot and miss, but at least making the effort, including in a dream sequence torn from The Exorcist.
The story centers on Ted (Matt Felmlee), a Minnesota University film student who has put off his big sound design project until the last possible minute. On the night he’s meant to get it done, he gets sidelined by his part-time job of (yes, you’re reading this right) being a singing telegram. Through this forced plot element, Ted winds up dressed up in a jingle-belled court jester costume at an unfamiliar apartment complex. It’s as obtrusive a piece of costuming as the dinosaur PJs in Rubén Galindo Jr.’s Don’t Panic. It’s here that he knocks on the titular wrong door, sees a girl begging for help, stares blankly at her and ends up going to the party, where he does the world’s most awkward job of being a singing telegram. Needless to say, the girl ends up dead in his car, and Felmlee’s character ends up on the run in that wacky court jester attire, and you get the lowest rent version of a Coen Brothers film you ever thought possible.
There is something to be said for the grainy, 18 frames-per-second feel of Super 8 that probably enhances the feel of THE WRONG DOOR, a thriller emulating Hitchcock and De Palma, but not quite making the grade (the fact that the pull quote on the video box comes from an anonymous Letterboxd review is telling). While Visual Vengeance’s branding is built on the look of vintage video – tracking flaws, dropouts and all – you get the feeling that THE WRONG DOOR wouldn’t track the same way on that medium.
Part of this stems from the directorial and editing choices. Shots are often held way longer than necessary, as with the close-ups of Felmlee’s face while he’s sitting on a couch in jester garb at a party, too socially inept to chat up the girls, or when he’s staring at the poor victim behind the Wrong Door itself. While we’re more attuned to processing visual and auditory information much faster in our present age of content oversaturation, even Hitchcock would probably want to trim this thing down, but that would dip it below feature-length (and a sale to the VHS market). Still, something compelling happens as a consequence. The film gains an unexpected hypnotic pull; The wrong choices create a strangely unreal feeling that, like the decision to lens in Super 8, pushes the film along like a haunted house ride on cart tracks, even as you recognize it isn’t terribly good.
Context is everything, though. Visual Vengeance’s spate of releases may not be the crème-de-la-crème of quality, but their love of the genre, even at its grubbiest, really shines through. Part of the company’s mandate is to sell what is admittedly lurid and/or kitschy schlock (as evidenced by packaging that includes faux VHS style stickers and a hilarious “Wrong Door” door-hanger). The other half of the equation sees VV as a film and video restoration boutique, and they’re great at doing their darndest to preserve elements that would otherwise be left to degrade over time. (Case in point: I’m beyond thrilled that Vinegar Syndrome recently saw fit to preserve and release 1986’s Canadian-lensed Psycho Girls, made partially by members of my own family.) You get that same feeling in the wealth of bonus features and commentary tracks. The fact that three buddies from film school put their hearts and credit cards on the line to make something speaks to the can-do attitude that’s often the best part of these kinds of movies. It must be gratifying that the passion project from their salad days gets a truly professional restoration job at last, loaded with extras, including all of their old Super 8 shorts. It’s a case of the right door opening this time around.
