You know that moment when a small child tries to wear Daddy’s shoes and shirt and hat and you just giggle and roll your eyes because they look silly and ridiculous trying to be something they’re not?

Well, that small child is the movie Parasites and it is trying desperately to fill Daddy John Carpenter’s Escape From New York shoes and not succeeding. At all.  It’s shuffling along, sloppy shoes slapping the floor, tiny arms in oversized sleeves flapping in the breeze.  And we just smile sadly and shake our heads. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, little man, before you can even think about putting that outfit back on.

In Parasites, three friends are on their way to (or coming back from, it’s not clear which, and it doesn’t really matter) a football game and get lost trying to detour in downtown Los Angeles. They get more and more lost the further into Skid Row they go, until they end up with a flat tire. When they get out to change the flat, they find a two-by-four studded with nails, and are quickly surrounded by a large group of mean, nasty, taunting homeless people.  This was no accident. The homeless group berates the three college boys, threatening them in retaliation for encroaching on their turf. The three guys must find a way out of skid row before they are killed by the rampaging group of miserables.

Sounds like a great start to an action-packed grindhouse movie, no? 

No. This is one of the most poorly-paced, over-written, badly-acted, stretched-out piece of audio-visual flotsam I have ever seen.

For example: there is fully twenty minutes (but probably more) of footage of people running. One person running, two people running, a group of people running. Running running running. That wouldn’t be bad in and of itself since this footage can be edited and played around with for maximum suspense. Not here, nope. Just minute after minute after minute of running, accompanied by either completely out of place songs (“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”) or Matthew Olivo’s throbbing Carpenter-lite synth soundtrack.

The over-acting is also really astounding. Characters yell at each other and grimace and nobody reacts in any normal way to anything. Robert Miano as Wilco, the leader of the homeless group, is the worst offender, chewing up scenery left and right, growling and making nonsensical proclamations to his flock of miscreants.

The director, Chad Ferrin, does make good use of the ambient natural light in nighttime Los Angeles. Characters are caught in pools of streetlight illumination or backlit by a tunnel’s lighting, but these eye-catching shots only made me more frustrated for the promise of a better movie that went unfulfilled.  Even the lingering shots of a muscular nude Sean Samuels flopping his way through the streets of LA couldn’t make this thing any more interesting or tolerable.

Uncle Mike sez go find something else to do. You’ll thank me later.