Dreamland

This is an odd movie that doesnt make a lot of sense and is VERY VERY talkie.

You wait for the payoff, but it's so slow coming that it begins to not matter.

It's directed like one o f those handful of artsy porn movies (Nightdreams, et.al.) from the late 70's /early '80s. But without the porn that made them interesting.

Venerable Canuck director Bruce McDonald returns to the big screen with a strange, all you can watch cinema buffet of cult-aspiring dishes best presented as a main course. As a series of small, TV sized bites, this might work, but it becomes quite a muddle as a single entity.

The good: Stephen McHattie. Not surprisingly, McHattie shines in a dual role tour de force of endless crackly Clint Eastwood close ups, and tough guy bad assery.

The bad: Dual roles are never a good idea. It is disruptive, and proves way too clever for it's own good.

More bad: Juliette Lewis, who can be fabulously sensational, is fabulously awful, giddily embracing a despicable role in a volcanic spew of boorish overacting.

There's more. The list is long. Too long. We have Henry Rollins raging. We have a child sex ring. We have a silly vampire. We have a mess.

Brimming with taboo subjects, theatrical violence, absurdist sequences, nightclub lighting, an endless stream of odd characters, "Dreamland" is a prickly stab at "Twin Peaks" cultdom. McHattie almost pulls it off, with a performance for the ages that includes a bizarro Chet Baker impersonation. But it's not enough. What McDonald is trying to achieve here is anyone's guess, so here goes. How about an insider's heroin trip? Let's go with that.

• hipCRANK

You have some really good actors here and a director who really did shine with Pontypool. Now that doesn't mean that the movie is going to be liked by a lot of people ... but it has some quirky moments and weird things going for it, that some will cherish.

That being said there is violence, there are flaws and other things. This is not something that will make people too excited, but it certainly different than any blockbuster you will see. Still cliches and other things get in the way and even with great actors at hand, not everything is gold that shines

Director Bruce McDonald must've known this movie sucks. He saturated the whole thing with a persistent, almost unlistenable score, not allowing the viewer any break from the dissonance. But I guess that's the point. Make the viewer feel uncomfortable. Not sure why but I guess that's what goes for art these days.

25% of this movie is a closeup of Stephen McHattie's face while he murmurs about something unimportant, slowly.