Channels

Having gone to film school for four years, I can say with utter certainty that there is nothing more punishing than having to sit through a bad student film (just about all of mine included). 'Channels' is a movie so poorly executed on every level -- writing, directing, acting, editing, perhaps even the catering -- that it gave me a serious case of film school deja vu. It's like watching the most pretentious and inept piece of freshman drivel, only one that someone dragged out to feature length and tried to pass off as a real movie. In fact, 'Channels' may be so utterly dreadful, that it's unfair to even compare it to student films.

Our story concerns Hollywood producer Black Racklin (Nat Christian, who also wrote and directed), who's firmly ensconced in a middle-aged creative rut. His current project is floundering, his friends and co-workers are haranguing him for his obvious lack of motivation, and the moneyman behind the project (Ed Asner, apparently late on his mortgage payments) is about one minute away from firing him.

Racklin, however, is the only director in history who has enough time during his shoots to sit around every night and watch TV. There he spots the beautiful and wise "Janet Goodwin" (Kimberly Oja), a character on a daytime soap who spouts all sorts of life-affirming profundities -- and instantly melts Black's "black" heart (get it?). Then, thanks to a supernatural twist of fate (i.e., a cheap rotoscoped lightning bolt), "Janet" suddenly becomes real and magically appears in Racklin's living room. What follows is a bizarre romantic comedy that tries to prove that in the grand cosmic scheme of things, love is still possible even when all human hope appears to be gone.

If 'Channels' sounds like a Lifetime-lite version of 'Heaven Can Wait' meets 'Click' meets Weird Al Yankovic's 'UHF,' that's giving it too much credit. This movie commits just about every sin of bad movie-dom, from the amateurish direction (there is so little sense of screen geography that I couldn't tell where I was most of the time) to the obvious and heavy-handed screenplay ("You used to make films that were real and alive, and now you're too dead to realize it!" a character screams at one point -- oh, boy). Writer-director Christian also makes the fatal mistake of having his boring main character narrate the entire film -- we're not seeing events dramatized, we're being told in excruciating beat-by-beat detail exactly what we're seeing on-screen. It's like watching one of those really lame shot-on-video public access soap operas and having it read to you at the same time.

That 'Channels' also plays like a high school play with a slightly bigger budget is also thanks to a cast that is largely comprised of the director's friends. How names like Asner (looking more and more like Wilford Brimley every day) and Joan Van Ark got sucked into this I'll never know, but nevertheless their performances are listless and unmemorable. If there is one bright spot in the movie, however, it's Oja. She's an appealing, likeable presence, and does what little she can to brighten a movie that's one seriously dim bulb. She's the only reason I'm even giving this flick half a star.

I suppose I could go on and list everything else that's terrible about 'Channels.' How about the haphazard editing? The cardboard-cutout sets? Or the horribly annoying score that contains only a single mawkish motif and the relentless tapping of a synth hi-hat that seems to run the entire length of the film's interminable 107 minutes? But I'll spare you the agony. Just take my word for it -- the only reason to watch 'Channels' is to get an education in how not to make a movie.