Title: Bellflower

Opens: August 5, 2011

There’s a reason young people leave their parents in flyover country and head for California. Southern California attracts outdoors types including surfers, swimmers, tanners, and everyone who likes to dress casually and lead the laid-back life enjoyed by Alan Alda’s character, Bill Warren, in Herbert Ross’s “California Suite.” If there are other reasons to go west, they motivate people like the twenty-somethings in Evan Glodell’s “Bellflower,” a picture not bound by a strict narrative structure or rational, sober people. If Woodrow (Evan Glodell), his best friend Aiden (Tyler Dawson), the nubile blonde Milly (Jessie Wiseman), her best friend Courtney (Rebekah Brandes, and Milly’s roommate Mike (Vincent Grashaw) enjoy California, it’s not for the weather or even the outdoors but for the drinking. These characters may start with beer and a cigarette when they get up in the morning (that is, if they can get out of bed before noon after their nightly binges), then proceed to whiskey and, in the case of two of the characters, eating live crickets in a bar contest. Two of these people are so bizarre that they’d be better off with lithium than with liquor, their manic states only occasionally become subdued into a hung-over depression.

“Bellflower” opens like Tucker Max’s “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” but quickly descends into more hell than beer and more Mad Max than Tucker. The director anchors the story in the role of Woodrow, a bearded layabout who pals around with a terrorist (of sorts), Aiden. The two are excited about a plan to firebomb targets, an idea they practice by blasting a propane tank dangling off the ground with a shotgun. They’ve also used some everyday products like a vacuum cleaner to construct as a flamethrower, and conjure up a car that they call Medusa that can spit fire through its exhausts. When will they actually use these products best? Only after “the apocalypse,” which they look forward to like the strange people who never tire of predicting the exact dates that the world will end.

The two males are sidetracked by romance. Woodrow takes up with Milly, who on their first date is all for driving to Texas to eat at the worst restaurant in the state. Woodrow is in love but Milly holds back: “I don’t want to hurt you.” Mike, who is Milly’s platonic roommate, turns out to be less than avuncular at one point, which infuriates Woodrow. Woodrow then takes up with Courtney, who is trying to decide which would be the lesser evil, Aiden or Woodrow. The era of violence that Aiden and Woodrow anticipate post-apocalypse becomes more severe in actuality than the playing around with flamethrowers.

The ensemble performs well in a picture whose budget is so low that at one point there was no money to pay the actors or even buy food for them. Shooting in Oxnard and Ventura, photography director Joel Hodge uses an oddball optical system constructed by the writer-director, one made for the SI-2K cameras, giving the picture a look of menace. Elements conspire to make the project unpredictable, which is more than you can say for most blockbusters out of Hollywood.

Rated R. 104 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Overall: B