‘Entropy’ Review
Stars: Miranda Nieman, Hayley Sunshine, Scott Hale | Written by Kameron Hale, Scott Hale | Directed by Kameron Hale
Entropy is defined as “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder”. Which is perfect for a film that makes absolutely no sense.
Entropy begins with a woman in tears and talking on the phone. This is Abby (Miranda Nieman; Gray Area) and she’s crying because she’s been told she has ovarian cancer. Her day is about to get worse though. Her girlfriend Miranda (Hayley Sunshine; Black Wolf) has accepted an invitation for the two of them to a get together with her old self-help group, a group that Abby can’t stand.
The reason for the get together is the return of Scott (Scott Hale; The Bedeviled) who had been off on a journey to explore the roots of the philosophies the group follows. If you’re thinking that this never ends well, you’re right. And this is no exception, for the characters or the audience.
By fifteen minutes into Entropy I knew I was in trouble. There was a bit of expository dialogue between the two women, a brief shot of Scott in an Uber holding a strange looking book and lots of random shots. By random I mean close-ups of food. Or cutting from Abby and Miranda in a car to a long sequence of a forest before showing them sitting on a log. Whether they were there due to pretension or padding, it wasn’t a good sign.
I was hoping that between Scott’s book and the group, or cult as Abby calls it, we’d get into some supernatural strangeness fairly quickly. The tentacle we see in the trailer also had my hopes up for some Lovecraftian entity trying to escape from the void. Instead, most of Entropy’s running time is devoid of anything but talk.
Instead director Kameron Hale (The Uninvited Guest) and co-writer Scott Hale give us relationship drama that’s beyond ludicrous. Miranda has neglected to tell at least some of the group that she and Abby are in a relationship. And she compares Abby’s ovarian cancer to one of the group’s migraines with the line “Everybody has their shit.”. I’d be calling a cab, going home and packing at that point.
Granted we do get some visions/hallucinations that are odd and fairly bloody looking mixed in with all of this. But they’re tinted in such an overpowering way and flash past so quickly it’s hard to tell just what we’re seeing, let alone be scared by it.
Of course instead of leaving Abby sticks around and we get to hear about the cult’s beliefs and “Falling into the flesh”. And finally, at around the forty-five minute mark, Entropy decides to try and get scary. Considering it only runs seventy minutes, yes it says eighty minutes but the end credits take up ten of them, that’s a long wait.
The Hale brothers made several shorts before Entropy, and it feels like they took another short script they had sitting around and padded it relentlessly until it made it to feature length. What little we get out of those first forty-five minutes could have been covered in about fifteen minutes if all the filler was stripped out.
The final few minutes of Entropy are bloody and do have an Evil Dead sort of weirdness about them. But none of it makes a bit of sense and I never gave a damn about whether anyone made it out alive. And, with a much shorter lead-in that may have worked as a gonzo short like BFF Girls. But as the payoff for what does come before it, the ending falls short.
* 1/5
Entropy is available on DVD, Blu-Ray and Digital platforms from Gravitas Ventures.
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