Review of Love on a Leash (2011) by Noah H — 18 Jan 2019

Sitting through Love On a Leash, it was nearly impossible to swallow as my jaw hung open in disbelief over every aspect of this "film". A rollercoaster of emotions washed over me during the viewing, from utter confusion to horror to near mental breakdown. The sheer ineptitude was difficult process. Moments of obvious attempts at humor lead me to believe this was a comedy, but serious dark moments including sexual assault and vehicular homicide paint a very different picture. I wanted desperately to believe this was all intentionally incomprehesible, but too many pieces lean toward this being an honest effort at creating an actual legitimate movie. But, how? How could this be? The editing, the ADR, and sound in general in the movie are so unbelievably atrocious, it seems you'd have to be trying to make it this bad. And yet, I don't think that's the case. There's a feeling of warmth and sincerity that can only be the work of someone wanting to proudly create something genuine. But every layer, every frame is failure in its purest form. So much so it's almost commendable. Sound cuts in and out with extreme abruptness, dialogue is almost all overdubbed & without any attention to matching mouth movements, and most of it sounds like a microphone was handed to a sleep-deprived alcoholic to adlib his way through the entire runtime. And then there's the ducks. Oh, the ducks. Perhaps there is some underlying symbolism that is too far beyond my mental capacity to understand. I estimate a solid 5-10 minutes worth of swimming ducks scattered throughout the movie, inserted awkwardly in between other awkwardly edited sequences, all with zero sound. No music. No background sound whatsoever. The whole thing is as if a highschooler shot a bunch of stuff on a handicam and buried it in a park somewhere, only to be discovered by some middleschooler who cut up all the tape with a pair of scissors and scattered it across their backyard. Then years later, a lonely middle-aged woman moved in and found the hundreds of slices of film and attempted to stick them together in some kind of order. Upon finishing this part, she sent the newly connected film reel to her out-of-work cousin at the halfway house where he resided, so he could record all the voices using his flip phone while enlisting the help of his fellow patients. After this was completed, he went to his cousin's house to give the tape back, but then ended up making love to her as well. 9 months later she gave birth and abandoned her newborn at a scrap metal dump site, with the finished film wrapped around her baby like a diaper. The baby was then found by an aging sex offender who took care of the baby in secret and brought the film into the pharmacy where he worked. He managed to salvage some portions that weren't drenched in urine and upon watching what was left of it, had an epiphany. He converted to Scientology and touted the film as a brilliant piece of historical filmmaking. After a story about all this ran in the local paper, it caught the attention of Jeff Bezos, who immediately put it on his Amazon streaming service for endless viewing, without having seen the finished product himself.

So, in closing, this was an undeniably fantastic film. 10/10.