From Barton Fink to Adaptation, the creatively blocked Los Angeles lifer is part of the city’s mythology – and this amusing splatterhouse horror-comedy is a nice addition to that canon. Orbiting around dilly-dallying and passive-aggressive prog-rocker William Brown (Jonah Ray Rodrigues), this film makes homicidal psychosis look like a blast. And it also gives Alex Winter his best acting role since Bill & Ted (also part of the blocked-LA-artist genre, come to think of it) yucking it up as a severed head.
William is hamster-wheeling his way to nowhere in his sound-engineer day job, while eternally finishing off a prog meisterwerk in his home studio. His lovely girlfriend Emily (Kiran Deol) puts up with his quirks, which include a pathological inability to confront their new neighbour Vlad (Winter) about the non-stop partying next door that is further impeding his progress. So when he finally does the dreaded door knock and is drawn into an impromptu wrestling bout with the incorrigible Slav, it’s safe to say that accidentally impaling his neighbour on an exposed barbell wasn’t part of the plan.
