DECEIT begins with a warning to the viewer that he must pay close attention to the opening scene or he will never understand the rest of the film. Unfortunately, not even close and repeated inspection of that scene can prevent the viewer from becoming hopelessly lost in this thinly
plotted and overlong science-fiction parody.
The supposedly critical opening scene depicts a man (Norbert Weisser) scribbling a quick note before gulping down a lethal dose of bleach. After his violent death throes have subsided, the man's body is found by an invisible entity who possesses it and wanders away. More than a month later the
man, now calling himself Bailey, is picked up by three travelers headed to Las Vegas--Hiram (Christian Andrews) and Wilma (Diane Defoe), who are eloping, and Eve (Samantha Phillips), their witness. Revealing to the threesome that he is an "alien sex fiend," Bailey kills Hiram and Wilma and forces
Eve to drive to a nearby warehouse, where he holds her hostage. After making Eve strip down to her underwear, Bailey tells her first that he and an otherworldly partner are here to destroy the Earth, then that he is actually an escaped mental patient and multimillionaire--all the while using a
mixture of coercion and intimidation in an unsuccessful attempt to seduce Eve.
Enter Bailey's partner Brick Bardo (Scott Paulin), who initially tells Eve that he is Bailey's doctor from the asylum before admitting that they are, indeed, alien employees of a galactic Environmental Protection Agency sent to destroy Earth for polluting the solar system--all the while using
his sophisticated wiles in an equally unsuccessful attempt to seduce Eve. Just before the Earth is to be destroyed, Bailey and Brick are confronted by an intergalactic cop in possession of Wilma's body, come to arrest them for stealing a powerful device known as "the cube." In the ensuing melee,
Eve shoots both Bailey and Brick, and the grateful intergalactic police grant the Earth a stay of execution.
It's hard to pinpoint just where DECEIT goes wrong. The work of director Albert Pyun is passable and even skillful in spots, as is both the acting and the dialogue. In the end, though, the film is just too long and too boring, filled with seemingly interminable scenes in which Bailey, Brick or
both attempt to bed Eve before leaving the planet. The jokes, too, are few and far between: apart from the opening scene in which Bailey's soon-to-be host commits suicide, the film doesn't really seem like a parody until the last 15 minutes, when zombie Wilma/intergalactic cop shows up. This
leaves more than an hour of film almost completely lacking in comedy of any sort; the sole exception is a radio from which we occasionally hear snippets of a crazed disc jockey's running commentary--most of it deriding the audience for wasting their time watching the film. Though Pyun squeezes
everything he can out of his tiny cast and meager story, DECEIT would probably have made a much better short film. (Profanity, graphic violence, adult situations.) leave a comment