Review - Motivational Growth (2013 - Dir. Don Thacker)

Things seemed to be off to a good start with this one because of one main fact: chiptune soundtrack. Regular readers of our sister blog Into the Valley of the Obscure will be aware of my love of all things bleepy so I was a happy man. Add to this some fake footage of a 16 bit style game that looked really cool and I was a very happy man. (In fact, to make this review 100 times better try putting on this top chiptune action as you read the rest.)

That's better.

Ian Folivor (Adrian DiGiovanni) lives a reclusive life in a small flat. The flat looks suspiciously like one of the houses I lived in when I was a student. Rubbish is everywhere and the walls are mouldy and grimy. His only friend is the telly which he calls Kent. All he does is sit around in his pants all day watching Kent. Then one day his life changes when he has an accident in the bathroom and a mound of mould (voiced by the legendary Jeffrey Combs) starts talking to him and controlling his life. As so often happens.

My main thought about Motivational Growth is that it would have been better as a short film. The material seems stretched to fit a feature length format. Part of the problem is not The Mold puppet (as a Farscape fan I'm happy to watch puppets for hours) but the way that it's used. There are way too many conversations between Ian and The Mold, all shot virtually the same way. The same angles and lighting are used time and time again and I've got to admit that it started to bore me. There is only so much time that I can spend watching a bloke talking to mould.

It does have its moments of humour though. Ian's encounter with his dream girl is one of the highlights as is the way that The Mold always gets a bit tetchy when he called Mold. 

It's not that I really didn't like this but I can't say that I liked it either (although you may enjoy some of its weirder aspects). So despite a good start to the film, the whole film wasn't that great a start to the festival.
4/10
evlkeith

If you like this you could also try:
Basket Case, Basket Case 2.