Test Screening

Four teens are excited when they find out that a test screening of a new movie is coming to their hometown, but their good times are dashed when the film turns out to be a mind-control experiment with terrifying consequences.

In late October, I traveled across the world to Trieste, Italy.

A port city in the far northeastern corner of Italy, Trieste is a mix of Italian, Austro-Hungarian, and Slovenian influences set hard up against the head of the Gulf of Trieste in the Adriatic Sea. Known as the “City of Coffee,” it was considered to be the end-point of the maritime leg of the famous trade route known as the Silk Road, and was an important deep-water port owned by the House of Habsburg, an aristocratic family that was as powerful as it was inbred. Now, it's just a nice little seaside city, and in October, it had a film festival called the Trieste Science Fiction Festival. While I was there, I saw several films.

Test Screening was one of them.

1982. New Hope, Oregon.

A group of four teenage friends Penny, Mia, Simon, and “Reels” the movie-head, are trying to stave off summer boredom in their shitty little small town/suburb of New Hope by hanging out each day, shooting the shit, and aimlessly wandering the idyllic tree-lined streets. But in a small town with very little to offer these kids–not only in their day-to-day present, but in their futures too—as it is going through the kind of perpetual “economic downturn” that these one-stoplight wide spots in the road have been going through in America for decades now, these four friends are not finding much success keeping their boredom at bay.

Also, somewhat ominously, they’re currently cut off from the outside world, due to maintenance work being done on the only bridge in and out of town.

Their only solace comes as Reels, who of course works at the town’s only movie theatre, finds out that a test screening of an unknown new movie is coming to New Hope. They don't know what film it will be, but whatever it is, a test screening of a mysterious new Hollywood film at their local theater? For a small town film lover and his group of friends, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. So Reels gets himself, and his three friends, tickets to the showing.

It's going to be amazing.

But then Penny is forbidden to go to the movie by her father, the town’s preacher. Penny is upset, of course, but she is more upset about not being able to spend time with Mia, the secret subject of her affection. Mia, meanwhile, has been spending a lot more time with Simon, and the pair have discovered the joys of extended make-out sessions, so that’s now their main priority. Reels feels abandoned by his friends and is angry about the inevitable end of this era of their lives. High school is over, and this Fall, they are all going their separate ways, but now, instead of being epic, their last summer together is threatening to fall apart. There’s a lot of teenage hurt feelings and angry recriminations, and as a result, the test screening isn’t the blast they were all hoping it to be.  

But even worse…

After the screening, the townspeople start acting strangely, and not in the way small town people usually do. They appear to be stuck in a trance-like state, and even stranger, the trance seems to be spreading throughout the community.

It turns out, the test screening was actually a government funded mind-control experiment, and everybody who sees the film falls under its thrall. Worse, those initial victims then spread this mental contagion amongst their neighbors, and soon enough, the entire town falls victim. And as more and more people succumb to the phenomena, it becomes clear that the effects of the test screening not only impact the mind, but the body as well, to horrific effect.

As things quickly get worse in New Hope, more dangerous, and much more gross, the friends must overcome their issues, and band together to try escape from their little hometown... before they are taken too.

Test Screening is a film that is not just about people who love movies, and the rush that comes with seeing a much anticipated movie, it's also about being on the edge of adulthood, and the trepidation of taking those first big steps. It’s about looking forward to the future, and the fear of change.

But also, Test Screening is a movie about Festival Brain.

Festival Brain is something that happens at Festivals, whether Film-centric, Music-centric, or whatever, but it's especially common if the festival in question is considered to be “indie.” It's the exclusivity. Festival attendees are often able to see or hear new projects long before general audiences are able to. Often times, those new projects are highly anticipated, and are a selling point of paying the Festival’s ticket price. And sometimes, unfortunately, those projects turn out to be not as good as people were hoping it would be.

And sometimes, people were hoping so much that the project would be great, because it was from a beloved creator, because everyone was so hyped to see it, because the buzz was so great, because they were part of the chosen few who will get to have the experience, because they will be able to dangle that experience over other enthusiasts, and because the whole thing was just such a fun and emotional experience...

Was it really that bad?

That's when it happens. People aggressively downplay the bad, and overstate the good. There's a desperation to it too, a relentlessness, as if their admitting that the project wasn't as good as they had hoped it was going to be, would also mean that they were duped, a bunch of marks, because only a complete rube would have been tricked by such an obvious lemon into paying the money to get to the festival. They can't have that. They're smart, experienced, insightful people, taste-setters. They're nice, with good intentions at heart, so—save for the few willing to admit they didn’t like it, or are just contrarians by nature—sometimes the festival attendees will then congeal into this giant mass of better-than-deserved critical responses, like a wall of adamant refusal standing tall against the disappointing truth. And the few who are willing admit to having not liked the new project then get descended on by that mass, to be shouted down, and buried in shit.

Because beneath its ridiculous premise, Test Screening is an indictment of conformity, and its body horror is a metaphor for forcing people to adhere to the acceptable narrow-minded standards of living set by a regressive and repressive society that intends to force people to deny their true selves, and live the way that the privileged and the powerful have deemed to be the "right" way. This of course means that, in addition to the obvious reason of capturing the nostalgia of 1980s Spielberg films, setting this film in a very typically cliched American small town is a very deliberate choice, one made for very specific reasons, chiefly being that you will find few places in the world that are more narrow-minded, regressive, and repressive.

But the whole problem with this film is all in the script.

This is a story with a decent set up, one that is pretty well executed. It has a good core idea too. But the story lives and dies on the four main characters. And while they’re all pretty endearing—I especially liked it when Reels acts out The Thing for Penny, Mia, and Simon—they just aren’t fleshed-out enough to carry the story. The film is missing too much of the essential moments that are needed to show us both who these characters are, and what they are to each other, the kind of things that will give their various fates a much-needed narrative weight, especially Simon and Mia. And even worse, once the shit does start to hit the fan, the film seems like it's in a bit of rush to get it over. As a film, Test Screening is almost there. It’s kinda there. But it’s not there.

Still, I can see the appeal that brought the film to the screen.

Writer/Director Clark Baker tries to add a nice darker edge to the film’s 80’s adventure/horror/comedy film-inspired tone. Whereas those films seemed to mostly feature either mildly to completely absent, but still loving and supportive, parental figures, reflecting the latch key kid world of the 1980s, Test Screening not only has a more contemporary-feeling cynical slant to it, but each one of the kids has to deal with not only absent parental figures, but abusive and puritanical ones, which, along with the repressive and narrow-minded small town setting, serves the film’s anti-conformity bend really nicely. Plus, like I said, the make-up and special effects are really great. There’s clearly a reason why the characters were specifically talking about The Thing in the film.

A mash-up of The Goonies meets Videodrome meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as well as a love letter to the power of movies, Test Screening is a pretty good attempt, but it’s held back by a script that feels half-baked and maybe a little too cut up, and in the end, the pieces just don't quite fit together.

Still, I’ll check out whatever Clark Baker puts out next.