Let's quickly dispense with the most obvious aspects of writer-director Randy Moore’s freshman film, Escape from Tomorrow. Yes, it is a surrealistic psychosexual horror film set at Walt Disney World. And yes, it was (mostly) shot at Walt Disney theme parks, surreptitiously and without the entertainment giant’s permission. And, yes, the film bears all the amateurish seams of a low-budget debut feature. The performances are wobbly, the pacing is erratic, and the narrative and scares are both repetitive.
And yet... Escape from Tomorrow is still an unsettling work of indie filmmaking, one whose perverse appeal transcends its audacious origins. The film concerns loutish father Jim (Roy Abramsohn), who is fired over the phone on the last day of his family’s vacation. What follows over the next 24 hours includes the usual amusement park angst: whining, quarreling, and vomiting. For Jim, however, it is also brimming with temptation and terror. Most conspicuously, two adolescent French girls catch his eye, prompting Jim to creepily adjust his path. Thing escalate from there, as his family begins acting strange, dolls start throwing him demonic grins, and whispers of disease flit through the park.
Narratively, Escape is uneven stuff, but ultimately its incoherence is more of a feature than a bug. While Moore touches on the obvious critiques of the Disney brands—the hyper-consumerism, the forced whimsy, the autocratic blandness—Escape is not a work of culture jamming. Rather, it is a sort of cinematic nightmare, full of weird juxtapositions and nonsensical yet disturbing details. While Moore’s ambition outstrips his storytelling talent, his creepshow instincts are comparable to those of Lynch, Polanski, and Cronenberg. At the very least, no recent film has presented an image so terrifying as a prisoner with his head encased in Epcot’s iconic geodesic sphere.
Escape from Tomorrow screens nightly at 7:30 p.m. on January 17–19 at Webster University’s Winifred Moore Auditorium. Admission is $6 (cash only).
