Austin School of Film

Damon Packard's film Reflections of Evil is a harrowing journey into American paranoia and the beginning of a millennium focused on solitary isolation, negative emotion, and mass consumption and over saturation. It is the story of a bloated and hated and dying American Dream.

 

The loose story follows an extremely overweight watch salesman named Bob. He lives with his aging mother in her 1960s style TV room, and his very serious sugar addiction. He is constantly rejected and humiliated by everyone he comes into contact with. He is a magnet for ill will and rejection. As the film progresses with constant rejections and brush offs he becomes more and more agitated and irate. He walks the city streets of LA and encounters handfuls of people who all seem inexplicably to want to kill him. They hate Bob...Every dog Bob encounters tries to attack him. This surreal and foreboding element is a times comedic but is truly more bleak and sad. It is the tragic image of the lone traveling salesman enraging every human and animal he comes into contact with.

 

The character Bob cannot stop consuming. Whether it is Sugar, ill will, billboards, TV movies, commercials or confusion… Bob takes it all in whether he knows it or not. As the film progresses, he goes from an idealistic watch salesman who accepts his set backs, to slowly morphing into an all consuming and addicted overweight mutant. He becomes a symbol for every citizen in modern American who has had millions of products/Ads/feelings thrown and bashed and pushed down into our souls. Just like the character Bob; over consumption, humiliation and isolation are what every citizen of the U.S. is facing day and day out...some just don't know it yet...and can't seem to shake it.

 

Packard obsessively and painstakingly uses film clips and TV segments from the 1970s and 60s...Inter cut footage from workout videos, cake frosting commercials, twilight zone episodes, footage taken from Universal theme park rides, footage from the THX commercials in old movie theaters. The film seethes with Packard’s feeling of paranoia and irrationality inherit in contemporary American culture. You can find the modern mind state enclosed and encapsulated within the film's random inter cuts of TV and movie segments. Reflections of Evil bombards us with ads, images, songs, secret POV footage of rides about films acting as toy commercials… Cramming huge amounts of data poised as information into souls bloated just like Bob’s disgusting body. Some viewers may say the footage is pointless or unneeded. Those are the people who accept this mind control device, unnoticed, like the all encompassing aspect of the modern era of media.

 

A secondary storyline takes place in the 1960s...We see Bob as a child taking the Universal Studio Tour with his teenage sister Julie and his mother. Julie wanders off onto the sets of Universal and away from the tour...Encountering some type of Mansonesqu Guru who has a cult following. Julie takes an overdose of an specified hallucinogenic drug and looks like she will die.

 

We again slide back into the present nightmare world of the impending Millennium.

 

Bob comes home one night eating mass mounting of Fruity Pebbles and watches TV. His mother awakes from bed to see what all the racket is about.

 

Packard does an incredible shift in tone and as the mother searches for Bob the film transforms into a 60s horror film. Strange gels and lighting techniques are used. Ominous shadows and mutating figures appear in the background. Packard's reference of the 60s horror suspense style is so well done, and to this he adds a layer of pure schizophrenia and disassociation. The stylistic changes pull us in and out – from the internal narrative to the external stylistic genre/movie references of the 60’s classic horror films- we are thrown off guard as viewers, feeling one thing, seeing another. We don't know whether to laugh at the schlocky over the top 60s mood lighting or scream in horror and pain as it twists our insides in a very uncomfortable and serious manner, all at once. Packard takes us to the world he inhabits. And doesn't let go...

 

One of the most interesting and strange segments of the film is a fictionalized behind the scenes look at a young Steven Spielberg (played by No Age's Dean Spunt!) making his TV horror movie )))) . This scene is not just a simple lampoon of the Hollywood mega director but seems to be another one of Packard's attempts of making us directly confront our own understanding and personal relationship with Hollywood and the culture of mass media in general...Spielberg being a perfect representation / symbol of such. The Spielberg shoot goes horribly wrong and a few old timer grips are electrocuted in a horrible accident. Packard tries to get across the cold feeling of disconnection and true uncaring that big media feels toward the “people” (aka the regular crew members who truly make the films of Hollywood)…who only end up being electrocuted for Spielberg's masturbatory art. The film again takes us to a whole new dimension of strangeness and insanity. Time and place are of no use. We as a audience feel as though we are in the mind of the Bob character. Constantly shifting our memories and moods, never truly in the past or present. Witnessing the hatred and coldness expressed by the big men at the top of the castle...

 

Packard's film is a true classic for the modern Millennium. It's obsession with the crazed lone chem trail obsessed conspiracy theorist and impending personal doom and the entire history of film and modern media culture itself is a perfect mix. Using the sleazy and shattered backdrop of Los Angles only furthers all 3 reference points at once. It's available on Packard's you tube channel....Watch please.

 

Rusty Kelley