Look, if you are only seeing the mainstream films which get advertised everywhere, shown in the theaters, and talked about by the mainstream press, then you are going to miss out on a lot of great films.
Yeah, some of them are going to be very strange, some may be outside your comfort zone, but let’s face it: the mainstream film industry is not going to give you anything as risky as Laguna Ave.
And, yes, this is a very risky film: it is in harsh, high-contrast black and white in an era where that is almost unheard of, with weird characters, bizarre, drug-fueled sequences and a descent into a mad, bio-enhanced subworld straight out of Japanese cyberpunk classics like Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
Russell is a slacker.
Mind you, he wasn’t always a slacker. He used to be a musician until he lost his hand in an accident, but he still has marketable skills. However, he hit bottom when he lost his latest job, one he thought would lead to several years worth of work and he is now apathetic and depressed.
He doesn’t even seem to have noticed that his girlfriend is not very happy with him, although he gradually realizes that she hasn’t gone North on a job assignment as she told him.
Just to make things worse, a strange new set of neighbors have moved into the apartment below, and they have been making strange and horrible sounds in the middle of the night.
But when his former boss attacks him in the middle of the night, his downstairs neighbor Gary saves him, but then gives him a robot hand and a special computer chip in his finger that will connect him to Gary’s new post human era.
Gary is an accelerationist and believes that we shouldn’t just wait around for evolution. Instead, we need to speed up the process and force the whole world into his new future — a future in which he and Russell will be gods.
Which is when things start getting strange…
Laguna Ave. gets off to a slow start. At first it seems a fairly routine slacker comedy of the Kevin Smith variety, but Gary, with his strange theories and paranoid claims (not to mention all the strange noises and power interruptions) gradually disrupts Russell’s little community of fellow weirdoes.
But then it goes full-on Japanese Cyberpunk, with more and more outrageous bodily modifications before it goes off into an utterly insane finale, which dumps us down an even deeper rabbit hole before we’re done.
You have to remember, though, that this is the American grunge version of Japanese Cyberpunk, full of slackers and druggies and what might be a huge corporate conspiracy.
Or merely Gary’s paranoid delusions.
Laguna Ave. looks great, with deep blacks and often dramatic lighting, although we also get grey on grey computerized surveillance footage, drug trips and dreams in very different black and white style.
While there are more computer graphics than the very Indie, shot on film look suggests, they have been cleverly integrated and are only obvious in some of the more extravagant scenes.
Perhaps the most fun here are all the insane body modifications which have been built out of scrap electronics — including some we watch Gary and Russell dig out of the trash!
As I’ve already said, it is not a film for everyone. It is blacker than black as comedies go, and you’d be hard pressed to find even one truly sympathetic character.
But it is funny, outrageous, and goes to a few uncomfortable but unexpected places.
So if this sounds like your sort of film, then you really need to see it.
And, if you prefer the bland and the safe, then I’m sure you’ll find something else you will be far happier with.
Although I can’t guarantee you will have anywhere near as much fun…
rivets on the poster 
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