Terese Aiello | Through the Shattered Lens

“Sex isn’t the only thing I care about. It’s just that I’ve always imagined myself falling in love with someone …. who’s alive. I know that may sound strange to you, but it’s just the way I was brought up.”

Sometimes, it just takes one line to transform a mere bad movie into a masterpiece of weirdness and that’s certainly what happens in 2003’s Julie and Jack when Jack Livingston (Justin Kunkle) attempts to explain why he’s having trouble with the idea of committing to Julie Romanov (Jenn Gotzon). Jack is a computer chip salesman who has been unlucky in love until he joins CupidMatchmaker.Com and meets Julie Romanov. He quickly falls in love with Julie, despite the fact that she refuses to tell him anything about her past and he never meets her in person. Instead, they spend their time walking around a virtual reality recreation of San Francisco.

Why is Julie so sensitive? Well, Julie is not exactly alive. When she was among the living, she was a brilliant computer programmer but, when she found out she was dying of a brain tumor, she managed to transfer her mind into the Internet. Her body may be dead but her mind and her personality live on, haunting dating websites. When Jack discovers the truth about his new girlfriend, he has to decide if he can be in love with someone with whom he can never have sex.

(It never seems to occur to either Jack or Julie that there also might be issues involved with someone having a relationship in which one person who is no longer among the living and will never age while her partner gets older and closer to his own death.)

It’s pretty dumb but it’s also so earnest and stupidly sincere that it’s kind of hard not to like it. Julie and Jack was the directorial debut of James Nguyen, who went on achieve a certain cinematic infamy with the Birdemic films. Just as the Birdemic films seemed to sincerely believe that they had something important to say about environmentalism, Julie and Jack has similar delusions of grandeur, with the main difference being that the message of Julie and Jack is a bit more heartfelt than Birdemic’s Al Gore-inspired preachiness.

The film has all of the things that we normally associate with James Nguyen’s work. The pointless driving scenes, the meandering travelogue shots of San Francisco, the scenes were everyone in a boardroom applauds, they’re all here with Nguyen’s other trademark obsessions. Because it’s not a Nguyen film without a reference to Hitchcock, Tippi Hedren has a cameo appearance as Julie’s mother and, of course, Nguyen includes a scene in which she talks about how much she loves birds. Do you think Hedren ever got tired of directors telling her to react to birds? I mean, she did make other films. Of course, other than Marnie and Roar, I can’t really think of any of them right now….

Anyway, Julie and Jack is silly and dumb and visually, it looks like a community college student film. At the same time, it’s so sincere and so cheerfully clueless about its inability to be the thought-provoking and mind-bending love story that it wants to be that I can’t help but like it a little. It’s a film that tries very, very hard and it’s difficult not to appreciate, on at least some level, the effort.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

(Hi! I’m currently cleaning out my DVR and, though I’m making some progress, I’ve still got over 150 movies left to watch and review! Will I finish before the world ends in November? Who knows!? Anyway, I recorded Dream House Nightmare off of the Lifetime Movie Network on April 2nd.)

I got really excited when Dream House Nightmare started and I saw those three magic words: “The Asylum Presents.”

“Oh, Hell yeah!” I shouted. “An Asylum film!”

See, whenever I see “The Asylum Presents,” I know that the film that follows is going to be a lot of fun. The Asylum is shameless about being over the top entertainment. There is rarely anything subtle about an Asylum film but that’s exactly why people like me love them. The Asylum has turned melodrama into an art form.

The other reason that I got excited about Dream House Nightmare was, from the opening shots, it was obvious that the film was set and shot in Louisiana. Seriously, an Asylum film shot in the Deep South? You better believe I was excited!

And, for the most part, Dream House Nightmare lived up to my expectations. It tells the story of a house, a really big house that practically anyone would die for. Madison Dupree (Terese Aiello) loves the house and would love to buy it. When she sees another couple looking at the house, she even tells them not to bother. She has determined that the house is going to belong to her. Can you blame her? She doesn’t have much else going on in her life. Years ago, she was named Mother of the Year but now, she has been relegated to the margins of society. She lives with her disabled daughter (Tenea Intriago, giving a poignant performance in a difficult role) and her white trash husband (Brett Baker). Why can’t she at least have a nice house?

However, she doesn’t get the house. A better offer is made by the Wades, Thom (David A. Cole) and his wife, Theresa (Rachel G. Whittle). Thom is an emergency room doctor. Theresa is pregnant and is often alone at home while her husband works at the hospital. Theresa has already suffered one miscarriage and is understandably worried that she’ll have another. It doesn’t help that the neighbors all think that she’s stand-offish. (“I’m just shy!” she protests and believe me, as someone who has often been wrongly accused of having an attitude, I knew exactly what she was going through.)

It also doesn’t help that Madison is batshit insane, so insane that she immediately launches a campaign of harassment against the Wades. She leaves threatening notes. She goes online and announces that the Wades are having an open house, which leads to a few surprise visitors. She leaves notes for the other neighbors, making Thom look like a pervert. When Thom and Theresa hold a party to get to know their neighbors, Madison attempts to blow everyone up.

It’s just all so over-the-top and insane that it’s impossible not to enjoy. The plot doesn’t have to make sense when it’s this much fun. It seems somehow appropriate that the film takes place in the Deep South. Down here, we embrace our melodrama. This film is a potent combination of Louisiana atmosphere and Asylum melodrama, with a healthy amount of random insanity tossed into the mix.

As I said, I’m always happy when I see “The Asylum Presents.” Films like this are the reason why.