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The Assignment: The Witches Talisman is available for free on YouTube.
DIRECTED BY: Kelly Helen Thompson
FEATURING: Kelly Helen Thompson, Bob Glazier, Abi Burgess, Kyle Calwhite, Steven S. Singer
PLOT: College student Cassy discovers that she is the only one who can prevent the gates of Hell from opening to unleash apocalypse upon the world.
COMMENTS: To drive home the point of how far from heroic the main character Cassy is, we open The Assignment: The Witches Talisman (a title I have copied exactly from the opening credits for maximum accuracy) with a scene of her academic advisor ripping her a new one. “How did you even make it into my school?… You disgust me! Why do I spend my time on you?” Basically, he’s not poised to write her a recommendation. So when he turns out to be the very same demon sent from the underworld to destroy life as we know it, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming.
Thompson, the film’s auteur, has publicly acknowledged that she wanted to make her own story in the vein of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a journey to female empowerment through a character who has greatness thrust upon her. A plucky heroine herself, Thompson has assembled the very definition of a DIY project, featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors, props and costumes pieced together from spare closets and dollar stores, and locations grabbed wherever they could be found. The score carries with it great power and importance, selected as it is from the oeuvre of the John Williams of royalty-free music, Kevin MacLeod. Simple solutions to big problems abound; in one crucial fight scene, I’m 90% certain that the villain’s chief weapon, meant to invoke Sith-like force lightning, is in fact Silly String. As I have said before, the completion of a film, any film, is something of a small miracle, and Thompson and Co. are to be commended for the effort of getting this thing to the finish line. It’s no Avatar, but by gum, it is a movie.
Unfortunately, some of those clever solutions end up being their own impediment, and nowhere is that more true than in the look of the film, which tries to make a virtue of its shortcomings by coating them with a thick layer of intentional obfuscation. Nearly every shot is filmed with a handheld camera to keep things unsteady, and then the images are overlaid with color filters, pixilation, and intense posterization. Rest assured that the filmmakers control the horizontal and the vertical; the opening warning advises, “You may think you are tripping out watching this film. Side Effects include Dizziness, blurred vision, due to the color, cave graveyard reality effect.” This warning is not oversold. Virtually every scene is presented in a mix of solarization and shaky-cam. Sound, too, is similarly blown out with massive reverb, scratchy sound effects, and more and more MacLeod. That makes it an uncomfortable viewing experience, if not actually strange. Anyway, take comfort in the affirmation that if you find it hard to watch The Assignment, it’s not you.
It might be possible to forgive the difficulties in, you know, seeing and hearing the movie. What’s harder to wave away is the lack of storytelling focus. It’s very hard to be sure just what you should take away from a screening of The Assignment. (I’ve watched it twice and still haven’t nailed it down.) The film isn’t really built around Cassy acheiving her destiny; she’s just thrown straight into it. It’s not about her introduction into a secret world hidden to us commoners, as the lore is mostly delivered through vague exposition and polished GIF inserts. And it’s definitely not a showcase for kick-ass fight choreography: when two characters attack each other with swords, it’s less enthralling then watching a pair of boys go at it with pool noodles. The film is episodic, with many scenes giving off a strong aroma of improvisation, as if the actors were given a one-line description of the scene and told to vamp. Rather than coming together, the pieces are just placed adjacent to each other.
I have mad respect for the hustle and the determination to keep at it that Thompson shows in getting this over the finish line and continuing to develop new work. (She has made the film available on YouTube, and her other works on the channel include what appears to be a sequel.) However, I must conclude that The Assignment: The Witches Talisman is certainly weird in the sense of being inexplicable, but so hard to access that it’s difficult to evaluate it under any other metric. That said, there is something perversely charming about how impenetrable it is. You know who agrees with me? Cassy. Following the final battle, she finds herself in an empty field and looks around in a blinding rage. “Seriously?” she demands of the heavens. “This is how it ends? What is it? What is it? It’s just some fucked-up terrible film… What was the point of all this shit?” I mean… I didn’t say it.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by… well, whaddaya know, Kelly Helen Thompson. Hi, Kelly! Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)