I've always felt there was something oddly compelling about public access television. Essentially, the FCC requires cable companies to provide training, equipment and air time for pretty much anyone (Wikipedia has an in-depth explanation of the practice here). I guess I just like the idea of a medium that has practically no standards. With everyones expectations set at zero, things can only improve, right?
T.V. The Movie is a low budget indie that appears to have grown out of The Adam Bomb Show -- a public access program inspired by The Tom Green Show featuring interviews, comedy sketches and local bands -- which broadcasts on Comcast Channel 25 in Santa Maria, CA. The film is so below the radar that, as of this writing, it doesn't even have an entry on IMDB. I'm unclear on what Rapscallion Films hopes to do with this movie, whether they're looking for a distributor or perhaps hoping to market the film themselves. I think the former might be a bit difficult as they use a guy dressed like Sesame Street's Elmo throughout the film, and at one point he brandishes a gun during a drug store robbery. I can see where that might turn distributors off. Further complicating matters is the fact that T.V. The Movie is also the name of a completely different 2006 movie starring Steve-O from Jackass.
Two roommates, Oscar and Brett, are having trouble paying the bills. When they suddenly realize they are three months behind on the mortgage and the bank is about to foreclose, panic sets in. They need to earn some scratch fast or our heroes will be out on the street. With the premise efficiently established within the first few minutes, it is largely ignored for long stretches. Oscar and Brett work behind the scenes on The Adam Bomb Show, and the rest of the cast and crew all live together and we are given a ringside seat to the shenanigans that comprise their daily lives. We meet their cohorts including Shanti the gun nut, Adam Bomb himself, and the aforementioned Elmo. Most importantly we meet Saul, Brett's twin brother who is played by the same actor as Saul only with sunglasses and a dopey accent. "We don't have a Cain and Abel thing going on," says Brett. "He's just a dick." Brett also has that magical facial hair unique to low budget films, its length varying widely from scene to scene and occasionally disappearing altogether.
Documentary style footage is combined with scenes of the same people performing scripted dialog, and I thought it was an interesting approach. The final result isn't what I would call a success, but the production values are reasonably high, with the exception of muddy audio that had me repeatedly rewinding to see what I had missed. T.V The Movie is a directionless jumble, which I wouldn't mind so much if the attempts at humor worked, most of which do not. After long stretches of character exposition and behind the scenes stuff at The Adam Bomb Show, the film periodically jumps back to the foreclosure issue. An onscreen countdown of days until our heroes lose their house consistently misspells the word "foreclosure," and Brett and Oscar jump from one money making scheme to another; including betting on the races, armed robbery and borrowing from the mob, all in a consistently unfunny manner.
The film strives to keep things clean as, besides some profanity and a gun-toting Muppet, there's nothing very racy here, though perhaps a little sleaze would have spiced things up. As it is, we've got an interesting concept that fails badly upon execution.
