Rating of
0.5/4
Deserves a Zero
Alan @ Transbuddha - wrote on 12/23/08
The film is just a nightmare. The acting is substandard, the plot makes no sense, and the idea of putting a child in a story with rotting corpses, heroin overdoses, and strongly hinted at incestuous themes is simply monstrous. Jeliza-Rose would have been better off with the Firefly family from The Devil’s Rejects (which Gilliam makes look like Mary Poppins compared to this).
Gilliam must at some point realized the train wreck of a film he was making, and with his usual sense of irony decided to finish the film with an actual train wreck. It’s a fitting metaphor for the entire film. I can only assume that Gilliam was trying to create his own twisted version of The Wizard of Oz
There isn’t a second to enjoy here, and what we are given is so insane and disgusting it’s barely watchable. If there’s a film that can be presented to young filmmakers as what what not to do then Terry Gilliam’s found it. Tideland is a depressing, inane, evil, unapologetic waste of time and money. I have never, in the course of my lifetime, left a theater before a film ended, but this one stretched me to my limits and if I hadn’t seen the film as a part of a local film festival ir would have been my first. I could go on in more detail, but I’ve already spent more time on this piece of garbage than it’s worth.
