A clever triumph of guerrilla filmmaking, “Escape From Tomorrow’’ is a dark fantasy/satire about a libidinous dad, shot totally without permission at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
When this debuted in January at the Sundance Film Festival, there were predictions that the Mouse House’s legions of lawyers would never permit Randy Moore’s subversive work to be seen by the public at large.
That they haven’t is a tribute as much to the filmmakers’ skill in exploiting legal loopholes (as Disney itself did with “Oz: The Great And Powerful’’) as the Mouse House’s apparently pragmatic decision not to help publicize an arty, starless little black-and-white movie that will likely play to tiny audiences.
Basically, the whole thing can be summed up as an epic midlife crisis. Jim (a fine Roy Abramsohn) learns by phone that he’s lost his job as soon as he’s arrived at Epcot Center with his overbearing wife (Elena Schuber) and rambunctious kids (Jack Dalton, Katelynn Rodriguez).
Instead of telling them, he instead ruins their fun by virtually stalking a pair of scantily clad, jail-baiting French teens (Danielle Safady, Annet Mahendru) through the park. Or is this just our unhappy hero’s fantasy?
That seems a pretty reasonable guess when the son’s eyes suddenly turn black — and the shutdown of the Buzz Lightyear ride is abruptly followed by a drunken Jim cavorting in bed with a middle-aged, and carefully generic, Disney princess (Alison Lees-Taylor).
The filmmakers took care to shoot the most offensive material — including Jim’s groin being tasered by a mad scientist inside the Epcot globe — off Disney property. And what you see of actual protected Disney property is served up in seconds-long shots to exploit the copyright law’s fair-use exemption.
So is Lucas Lee Graham’s luminous monochrome cinematography, which distances the material from reality as well as from Disney’s lawyers. And then there’s Abel Korzeniowski’ s stringy score, which might best be described as Mouse House on LSD.
“Escape From Tomorrow,’’ which is available mainly through video-on-demand release, was made on such a minimal budget that it borders on the amateurish, and risks wearing out its welcome even at 90 minutes (14 minutes shorter than at Sundance).
But it’s also more authentically independent than 99 percent of what we call indies these days.