I am a real fan of indie film. I love to support small creators who are following their passion and have a story to tell. I find it really exciting to stumble upon an indie that no one knows. When you can tell that a lot of heart and soul went into it. It can be really magical.
"Lies Buried Inside" is cynically taking advantage of people like me, and it just makes me really sad. It's a legitimately terrible movie in just about every sense. It looks like a teenager stole his dad's DLSR for their High School project. The cheap plug in effects make it look like a PowerPoint presentation at times.
Director Steve Moon has directed about a dozen movies in the last few years, so out of curiosity I watched another one. I thought maybe this was some bizarre one-off experiment, and his other movies would show some passion or at the very least competency. The other movie I watched, "Below Water" is basically the exact same thing. Extremely amateurish production quality, and a practically nonsensical story.
The way I see it there are 2 possibilities here:
1) This director is just clueless. Like Tommy Wiseau, maybe he thinks he is brilliant and refuses to take any criticism at all, and he is independently wealthy so he can finance his films, and he actually believes he is making art. If this is the case I'd say he and his collaborators deserve pity. They believe they are making art, their ignorance and pride just holds them back. This is the charitable interpretation.
2) This director knows his movies are trash and his goal is to just pump out as many as possible, sell them to Pluto, and hope that nobody ever actually watches them. He squirts out a movie in a long weekend with one or 2 naive actors (probably working for free), and makes $10k or so from selling it to Pluto. He doesn't care if the movie is quality or not. If this is the case, this director is actively harming the art of indie film making. Grifters like this are ruining the hobby, and they are taking opportunities from actual artists who have passion but no money.
I can't imagine making this movie and proudly showing it off. It's that bad. Shockingly bad. One of the worst films I have ever seen. This couldn't have been made with the goal of telling a good story or creating a good experience for the audience, this film could only be made with the end goal of selling it for a paycheck.
I get the the movies are a business, but when did it become OK to put in zero effort? How can a movie this openly bad be profitable for anyone? This movie, and the long resume of it's grifter "director" are very grim signs for the future of indie film.
