User Reviews

The acting is great. The cast accurately depict people in a small town and remind me of various people in my small town upbringing. Even the young man is realistic as a mentally ill 20 something year old. I would say if you are curious what a delusional young person that experiences a psychiatric break from reality experiences then watch this sad truth. It is very accurate. He is convinced he invented a machine to see heaven. When he reveals it to close friends and they see static on a screen instead of heaven, he suffers another break. He takes hostages on a bus that are elderly and want to believe him. In the end a stand off with police in his small town leafs to the bus being shot at and bursting in flames killing everyone on board. I have met and worked with people in the mental wards that experience very similar breaks. Although with different delusions than his. The media likes to show films and news like this showing people hurting others. In reality this is an inaccurate depiction of what tends to happen. Usually they are hospitalized and abandoned by families eventually who can not understand.

Finally! Keith Gordon picked a role where he doesn't come off as ultra-creepy or arrogant (see 'Christine' and 'Combat Academy'). This low key role was perfect for Gordon (but I still think he's a much better director than actor).

In Static, Keith Gordon is Ernie, a young orphaned when his parents were killed in a car accident. He is the famed inventor of this strange town (which includes a pseudo-believer/ex-Green Beret evangelist cousin). After two years of working on a highly secretive project, Ernie is ready to unveil to the town (and to the rest of the world) what he believes will change their lives forever, a television that gives real-time images from Heaven.

Everyone thinks Ernie is definitely ready for the madhouse (though I don't know how such a strange town could think he is somehow so strange that it stands out), and Ernie is confused by their reaction. Those who were invited to witness the demonstration of the project claimed they couldn't see anything, but Ernie was convinced there was something there. Ernie's friend, Julia (Amanda Plummer), who drifts into town at the right time (Ernie revealing his project), makes a great point: what is the point of the invention if people believe that Heaven exists anyway?

Static is what an indie movie should be. It's not too pretentious like your modern indie fare and gives us a generally bizarre comedy in the style of Bagdhad Cafe or Rosalie Goes Shopping or even Repo Man (and the eerie combination of Johnny Cash and obscure 80s new wave makes it even more of a sister to these movies). Movies where the events are just so strange, but since the characters are all so weird as well, their reality appears to them, a normal existence. And, best of all, the filmmakers stayed true to their intentions and didn't try to make everyone feel so gushy with the typical Hollywood Happy Ending.

If you really love bizarre 80s movies (though, the story is not so coherent to be considered too bizarre, or too avante garde), then you won't go wrong with Static.

Static is a remarkable, but unheard of movie. It remains in the dungeons of obscurity due to no DVD release. It's a real shame that unique films like this don't get around more often. Gordon starts the film as a keyboardist. He soon walks away from his band and we later see him on the assembly line for crucifixes. This is a bizarre, yet interesting job. One that many would have never thought of. With so many crucifixes out there, somebody must assemble them, and the job itself tells a lot about our protagonist. He is part of religion on an assembly line. Every day he attaches Jesus to the cross hundreds of times. Gordon also decides to keep the deformed factory defects. On his wall are many different Jesus'. These could be commenting on the mutilating of religion itself, or how Gordon finds beauty in all of God's creations. Even those that go against the norm. Gordon is also working on an invention which he keeps a secret from the town. The film plays it very straight, and is constantly burrowing its way through your mind. It's a truly intelligent and sensational film, with a thoughtful and well constructed script. The performances are spot on, with Gunton as the eccentric cousin, really standing out. If you are bored with the predictability of films that are simply extensions of their trailers, hunt down this film.

A relatively interesting movie until it implodes at the exact same time when the bus explodes.

An inventor (Gordon) loses his parents in a car-crash, and then spends the next two years working on a device that would show direct images from Heaven. Realizing that he is the only one who can see images of Heaven on the screen (while others see only static), he flips his lid and decides to "hijack" a bus, with its elderly passengers being willing participants in the sham. The bus explodes after a cop shoots at it (duh), killing the inventor and everyone else in it. His girlfriend, the beautiful and stunning and sexy Amanda Plummer, under shock, goes to his flat to take a look at his invention one final time; but again she sees nothing on the screen. However, the last scene shows her leaving the town, with a wide grin on her face. Did she see Gordon i.e. Heaven on the screen, after all?

Or did she simply lose her mind, too? Or was she smiling because she had thought of a very funny joke, perhaps? Or maybe she couldn't believe her "luck" for having a movie career? Nothing would surprise me; she does play a very ditsy character, after all. In fact, Plummer is much like that other nepotistic semi-amateur, Melanie Griffith, in the sense that both are totally limited to playing dim-witted, goofy-voiced women with three brain-cells. And even that they can't do particularly well.

So was Gordon out of his gourd or did he actually see something on his device which for some reason others couldn't? To me, that isn't the most pressing question here. The real dilemma here concerns whether the writer/director has all his marbles or not: why the Hell would anyone cast Amanda Plummer as anyone's love-interest??? She is one of the most extreme examples of Hollywood nepotism gone wild, along with others such as Anjelica Huston, Laura Dern and others.

I thought it was daft from the director to get Gordon to tell Plummer that she is "the total opposite of crazy". That was intended as a compliment, not only from Gordon by the director as well (i.e. it was intended sans the irony), but what it implies instead is that she is utterly boring and common. Duh.

"Static" is a fairly original movie with solid dialogues and an unusual story-line. The basic premise had (or still has) great potential. Where it all comes tumbling down, however, is the ending with the bus exploding. With Gordon buying a bus-ticket "Static" enters "goofy-comedy" territory, and yet just as it does that, it suddenly gives us this totally bizarre, out-of-the-blue, absurd tragic event which in no way, shape, or form fits into this movie. It is quite obvious that the director had written himself into a dead end, a blind alley, a corner, clueless as to how to wrap up the proceedings. So like any amateur writer desperate to finally complete his script, he tacked on a totally preposterous, over-the-top, idiotic explosion. "Hey, an explosion kills nearly everyone, so my movie can end, right?" Yes, that is correct, Sunshine, the explosion does solve your problem, but it also RUINS your movie.

Besides, it made zero sense for any of the cops to shoot at the bus as it started moving without getting the all-clear from the sheriff, and without even having a pressing reason to do so. (Or have you perhaps ever heard of an American hijack situation involving dozens of hostages, in which the cops have the go-ahead to blindly shoot at the vehicle in question as soon as it starts moving? I haven't). Not to mention the moronic ease with which the bus explodes, as if it had been DRENCHED with highly inflammable liquids from all sides, as if it had been meticulously and intentionally prepared by the company that runs these buses to explode like a bad guy from a "Die Hard" movie.

What is it with movies and their bombastically exploding vehicles? If cars and buses really exploded as easy as they do in movies, there would be millions dead in road accidents throughout the world every month. Given that "Static" is an indie movie – the type of films that are supposed to relieve us from all the usual Hollywood cliché bull – it is doubly shameful that the writer/director resorted to such a cheap plot-device. (And he could have saved some money in that shoe-string budget of his by not having to shoot an explosion.)

Perhaps if someone neutral had proof-read the script before pre-production started, then the cretinous ending would have been re-written and we would have had a good film on our hands. As it is, "Static" is just another great premise that peters out due to a lack of imagination on the writer's part.

Gordon invites his friends and their KIDS to the grand presentation of his invention. Why anyone with more than half a brain-cell would actually risk having 3 young kids endanger his presentation – or the device itself – is beyond me. That was a stupid touch. In the end, the kids and their monster masks end up on the movie's poster. Why?

The director, Romanek, seems to be over-idealized and worshiped by many "art-crowd" film-goers apparently for the simply reason that "Static" came out early, before indie films reached their qualitative peak in the 90s, gradually being mass-produced, eventually dropping in quality, becoming just as hopeless as the Hollywood films they allegedly wanted to stray from. I think these people tend to (sub)consciously ignore the movie's obvious flaws, and to greatly exaggerate its positive sides. Romanek cast Keira Knightly in his latest movie, and had spend decades working on trashy MTV videos for the likes of Madonna and Michael Jackson. Not exactly the resume of a brilliant film-maker.