The illegal movie made in Disneyland without Disney’s permission
Escape From Tomorrow (2013) is a small, independent horror movie secretly made with a bunch of low-budget equipment at Disneyland in order to stick it to The Man. Unfortunately, The Man ignored this boring-ass horror comedy, and basically sidestepped all the attacks the movie posed about corporate greed and “cultural vandalism”, as rogerebert.com puts it. This movie like scribbling on a fine piece of art, if Disneyland was art. Fact is, it’s not art. The movie posits that it’s a life-sucking amoeba, ready to ruin your relationships and destroy your life. Wow. It’s just pirates and cartoons, guys. Geez.
Most of this movie is a slow-burn of destructive vices, as the movie slowly deconstructs it’s main character Jim, and he goes insane. Roy Abramsohn plays Jim as an everyman, with a wife that rebuffs him at every opportunity and an unnatural obsession of two female teenagers who wander into his vision. Most of his bad habits are taken to the extreme and he’s put through a series of tortures as he guides his family through Disneyland. Most of this stuff is supposed to be funny, but a lot of it is really dry and dark. He waits for a ride with his son for hours and then it closes. He buys the wrong gift for his wife and she yells at him. The ride through It’s A Small World turns into a trip through Hell, which is about the most literal allusion I’ve ever seen. Hilarious stuff?
The plot is slow and the encounters I mentioned are short interludes between the family riding a few dozen rides at Disneyland. Most of the runtime is filled up by shots of the family sitting apathetically during the ride, while the family problems and Jim’s inner-conflict becomes secondary, overshadowed by endless shots of stuff that doesn’t mean anything to me. Jim struggles through most of the scenes, and he eventually has to deal with an actual witch, who started out as a disgruntled Disneyland employee. He eventually becomes sick with the Cat Flu and coughs up some hairballs, in another literal joke that’s supposed to be hilarious.
This film got away with their illegal activities at Disneyland and just about every copywrite infrigment there is. They turn some of the female Disney cast members into prostitutes, for example. Jim eventually considers that Disney has an ulterior motive but I couldn’t tell you what it was. This main point becomes lost and it’s too subtle for me to try to find amidst the other crap but it has fallen on deaf ears for just about everybody else because I hadn’t heard about this movie back in 2013 and it still sits well under the radar. Disney could have slapped them with a big lawsuit but they didn’t and this movie disappeared into obscurity. It only had a small amount of buzz when it was shown at Sundance around the time of it’s premiere.
Overall, this is an average movie. The characters are good and the acting isn’t bargain-bin terrible, but the ideas are either too much for the filmmakers to handle or I can’t catch what the movie is really trying to say. I guess I’m not high-brow enough for this indie film trying to take a stab at The Man, but Disney sidestepped this landmine like a pro, ignoring them to death. The one theme of happy-happy-fantasy peddled by Disney versus realism is a great concept but the movie doesn’t go far enough to actually say anything new, because I can’t decipher any real originality from it. Okay, corporations are evil and The Man wants to step on us, but what else is new? This concept is not worthy of a 90 minute movie, not in the way it’s put together here anyway. It tries at least, which is something, at least.
