Loaded (1994) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

If they were referring to Anna, I'm not too sure who the acclaim came from, or what they were acclaiming, because this was her only feature-length movie, it is just awful, and she has never been hired to direct another film in the decade since. So if you're one of the acclaimers, you better start acclaimin' a lot louder if you want more from Anna, because she's no wunderkind, having turned 50 a while back.

Actually, although the script to this film is so bad it makes Manos: the Hands of Fate seem like The Red Violin, Anna Campion did exhibit some talent as a director. The atmosphere of Loaded is managed well enough that you may hang on waiting for a payoff, as I did.

Unfortunately, it never comes.

Here's the summary:

Intending to make a no-budget horror film, a group of neurotic young adults spend the weekend together at a country house.

• In the first act they demonstrate their neuroses, jealousies, and rivalries as they begin working on the film.
• In the second act, they take LSD and act very stoned. This ends with one of them dying.
• In the third act, they conspire to cover up the death, in order to hide their careless drug abuse.

Watching people take drugs has never been one of my favorite spectator activities. In fact, as a spectator amusement, I'd say it ranks slightly below pinochle, Monopoly, and horseshoes, although slightly above Kabuki Theater, Wagnerian Opera, and Detroit Tigers baseball. I suppose it might be kind of interesting to watch druggies if the stoners were funny and educated. A good rule of thumb, however, is that people who are mean-spirited, negative, self-absorbed babblers when they are sober will exhibit even more of that behavior when stoned. If they are the types who enjoy babbling about the meaning of life and aesthetics, and/or the types who take every single statement by everyone else as a personal insult, you can safely bet that watching them stoned will be unbearable even if you know them and get stoned with them. If you are straight, and they are strangers, watching them is tantamount to experiencing life in a Turkish prison.

I'm being unfair to the Turks. The Turks have been doing a good job at re-positioning those prisons in their drive to get into the EC. Just think of them as Turkish Spas. Club AhMed. I love the ads. "Turkish Prisons. You'll come for the foot therapy. You'll stay for the taffy."

The bulk of this movie involves watching shallow, humorless, uneducated wankers take LSD, so that their thoughts become even more incoherent and they start babbling these uninformed and foolish thoughts out loud - all while dancing around the room and doing head-stands accompanied by Ravi Shankar music. They experience audio and visual hallucinations. They see wallpaper come to life. They hear Bill Clinton take a vow of celibacy. They seem to see a lot of the world through a fish-eye lens. A good five minutes of this film has to consist of people spinning around with their arms outstretched.

You know, that whole 1971 Eliot Gould Dennis Hopper thing, man.

What about that horror movie they were making? That could have a been a rich mine of character development and a chance to exhibit some humor about the film industry.

Could have been, but wasn't.

What it should say on the DVD box is this: Warning. Do not show this movie to any foreigner who is familiar with the terms of the Geneva Convention.