Colorado-based video surrealist and filmmaker-actor Nick Gatsby offers a “microcinema” sci-fi oddity with cult potential for a certain segment of viewers. There is also potential for a rise in eyedrop sales, as Gatsby renders his urban/suburban locations in a heavy Day-Glo filter-scape of exotic digital filters (like the faux-thermal imaging one we’ve all tried at least once) and high-intensity chroma overlays.
In a future defined by cyber-artifice (something like The Matrix, perhaps, only on a pocket-change budget), three – or so we think – elite and amoral beings, symbolizing money, industry and power, play a cruel game with living characters, called Zappers. The premise is that the late, legendary skateboarder Floyd Lennon left behind four clues in “portals” around the city that point towards a vast prize of unspecified nature, but certainly worth the players risking life and death (just not their own).
It’s a rationale for the assorted Zappers (one played by Gatsby himself, another by producer Skye Armenta) to go through mildly noirish situations of ambushes and betrayals over the Macguffin, among found environments in Denver and Colorado Springs, heavily doctored by video f/x and greenscreens into a rainbow-hued fantasia.
Some moments are inspired, such as the music club dancer who turns out to wield a deadly decapitating hula hoop (gore and dismemberment are cartoony in a most literal fashion), and it is a running gag that bananas are powerful ray-shooting hand weapons. From time to time the camera pulls back to reveal that what we are seeing is indeed a movie being made with actors, a touch both clever and jejune.
But even with a line as memorable as the battle cry, "Magic Pug - activate!" over the long haul, ZAPPER! remains an optional acquired taste, mainly for collections with outre and avant-garde tastes and strong visual-arts orientations. Smatterings of profanity, more so than the stylized violence, will be the main objection, though of course, public library shelves in the Rocky Mountain territories could set aside a niche as a hometown-proud production.