Spectres of the Spectrum (2000)

Truly the worst movie I've ever seen in a theater

Sick Product of a Sick System

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Blistering performances.

Mind-boggling, somewhat exhausting, but gorgeous, original, and totally vital, "Spectres of the Spectrum" is part practical joke, part hysterical paranoid rant, and part sci-fi film, wrapped in one glorious low-budget package. I've never seen anything like it. Baldwin has taken a breath-taking amount of archival film footage (who knows where he got all of it) and chopped it into a fairly lean history lesson on the use and abuse of electricity and electromagnetic frequencies. Some of it is true. Some of it isn't. Some you wonder about. All of it is fascinating. At first he gives you the information so fast you feel overwhelmed, but eventually a pattern starts to unfold. It takes place in a parallel world where a man and his daughter are living in an airstream trailer in the desert. Some kind of apocalypse has occurred. The man and his daughter speak without talking. This original footage is a bit cheesy and involves time travel and some really bad f/x (they may be intentionally bad), but fortunately doesn't take up too much of the running time. Anyway, see this if you have any interest in fringe art or cut-up technique or conspiracy theories. I found it a little overwhelming, but totally mesmerizing.

Initially, this film is very hard to take seriously, both for its relatively heavy use of noise-imagery and static which remind me strongly of experimental films (some of which I've made), and secondly because of an odd voice-over claiming doom and gloom in a way that calls back images of terrible sci-fi shows from the fifties and sixties with people running around in plastic suits.Very soon afterwards, the film takes a turn for the serious, but still holds on to both the headache-causing flashings of distorted images with a couple of characters (ironically, both are epileptic) who often quote those same bad sci-fi features.However, in order to add a certain element of the profound, the film takes images from our entire history of filmed and televised images and combines them together into a story of the world's slow suffering from the over-abuse of wavelengths by humanity. This abuse is reflected in everything imaginable, from religious ideologies of tapping into the meaning of the Universe, to scientific endeavors to gain free energy from all the Earth, to economic globalization and multimedia conglomeration. All sent with various examples and historical contexts to remind me of the advice, "If you're going to lie, provide as much truth as you can in the midst." Moments in the movie occur that, almost, touch upon a documentary-like air that makes the entire movie very foreboding......and yet then the characters come in and construct cheesy time-travel devices and run around the Universe yelling and being annoying and talking about "hidden messages" and "saving the spectrum" and it all kind of falls apart.All in all, because I'm very interested in avant-garde styles of cinema, it's not a bad try. It's just that it is very overstimulating (I wouldn't be surprised if everyone else in the audience got the same headache I received from it, and it's ironic that there's no way an epileptic could watch this) and eventually disappointing. A good start, but could have used a bit of rewriting to give it a much more serious tone.--PolarisDiB

That's how I was when I walked (staggered) out of this "film". I couldn't leave, because it was at a film festival and the cinema was full of people. I was stuck in the middle. Trapped.The tiny fragment of original footage which attempted to bind this film together features some of the worst acting ever to grace the big screen. The daughter was a stand out performance - stand out in the bad sense.Thge cinematography was hideous, consisting of disjointed framing and some of the oddest lighting I've witnessed.As for the stock footage... well at first one...Wait.Why am I reviewing this film? Why do I acknowledge its existence? Please, don't watch it. Do something useful with two hours of your life and go watch some paint dry.

Spectres of the Spectrum can't be described in words, it has to be seen on the screen. This film is comprised of original material, stock footage and public domain film clips to give the history of electric media and how it will change the future of life on Earth forever. It is a non-stop barrage of sights and sounds that will leave the audience gasping for breath in the end. Make sure not to miss this film, it will change the way you look at the way we communicate and who does the talking for us.