The Once And Future Smash/End Zone 2

When any community experiences marginalisation, there’s a tendency to band together in resistance and to find internal means of celebrating what is rejected by the mainstream. Accordingly, it’s a rare Frightfest which does not include at least one documentary about some aspect of genre filmmaking. This is the guise in which The Once And Future Smash arrives, posing as a tribute to supposed genre classic End Zone 2. It’s an amiable mockumentary which gets some of its pastiche spot on, but runs short of ideas well before the end. The 40 minute film which follows, presented as the first two reels of End Zone 2 itself (the third having been lost), has similar problems. Although they are treated as separate films, we have decided to review both together here because it seems unlikely that they will ever been seen separately.

First up, a note for viewers outside North America: the terms ‘smashmouth’ and ‘end zone’ cone from American Football, and snippets of other such terminology also appear here. What it all means isn’t terribly important – the significant thing is simply that it establishes the connection between End Zone 2 and the sport, and fits into a long tradition of bad puns in Seventies slasher films. End Zone 2 is concerned with a successful young player of that sport who is hideously deformed and goes looking for revenge on those he deems responsible: primarily a group of four young women who, some years later, are holidaying together in a cabin in the woods.

The central conceit in the mockumentary is that two different actors – Mikey Smash (Michael St Michaels) and William Mouth (Bill Weeden) claim to have played the iconic Smashmouth, but the layers of costume and special effects make this claim hard to verify, leading to a long-running rivalry. Regular attendees of genre conventions will be familiar with similar rivalries between the stars of certain iconic films and TV series, so there’s a lot of send-up potential here, even if it is accessible only to a fairly small demographic. The trouble is that it gets spun out for far too long, and much like some of those stars, these two characters are not really as interesting as they think they are.

In and around this rather clumsy comedy narrative are a selection of fantastic talking head interviews which capture the style of genre documentaries perfectly. The likes of Lloyd Kaufman, Adam Marcus, Mark Patton and Laurene Landon are old hands at this kind of work and discuss End Zone 2 with such authority that you may well find yourself wondering if you’ve misunderstood and it’s a real phenomenon, especially as they weave in stories about the production and little personal anecdotes so precisely in the style of the real thing that one wonders if they’re slightly emended stories about other films. This part of the film is strong, and would have been better served if left to stand on its own or with a few lengthier clips from the film thrown in to make it up to full length running time.

End Zone 2 suffers a little due to emerging just four years after David Amito and Michael Laicini’s remarkable Antrum, which took on a similar challenge. A lot of effort has been made by the production team here to recreate the period, but there are too many anomalies to allow one to truly settle into it, and too few to let one brush them off and enjoy it on a different level. The conversation between the women shifts around wildly in tone, with parts of it sounding far too modern. The clothes are well chosen but the make-up lets it down. The ageing effects on the film itself look far too regular and digital (there’s a lot to be said for damaging film physically in this kind of scenario, as Brendan Steere did to great effect in The Velocipastor).

One thing here deserves serious praise, however, and that’s the performance of the woman playing complicated final girl Nancy (basically the Jamie Lee Curtis character). It’s difficult to find a trustworthy credit for her because the film is so committed to its own myth, but she does an incredible job of capturing the posture and mannerisms of the genre heroines of the period, at the same time as convincing in role. This is the kind of work which does get remembered and give small films staying power, and it’s liable to be talked out long after The Once And Future Smash and End Zone 2 are forgotten.