It's A Complex World

Stars: Stanley Matis. Buried within this low-budget cornball tale, the subversive spirit of rock 'n roll ticks and occasionally gives a raucous tock, but it's too little, too infrequently. Set at the Heartbreak Hotel, a rock nightclub dive run by the son of a fascist Presidential candidate, the film stars Stanley Matis as Morris Brock (a nerdy Elvis Costello type who sings songs designed to stir up the audience, such as "Why Do We Feed the Broads?" and "New Jersey.") Recruited by terrorists, Morris and his friends have placed a bomb in the basement of the Heartbreak Hotel, set to go off at 1 a.m. Only problem is that the club owner is too busy to be bothered with bomb threats, and won't even look in the basement. While the real-life band The Young Adults play such off-beat hits as "Do the Heimlich" onstage, another band sits in the basement playing cards and talking to the spirit of Elvis on the telephone, and outside a preacher lectures a street bum on the similarities between hell and a rotisserie, while a group of bikers led by a worshipper of Stonewall Jackson gun their engines in anticipation of a major butt-stomping at the Heartbreak. Weird? A bit. Alas, It's a Complex World is too fractured for its own good...it goes after society's sacred cows with a shotgun filled with buckshot and usually misses (though the few hits are choice). Audience: Rockers looking for laughs (desperately).