Retroactive

It was a time when interior decorators came out to make buildings over as parodies of themselves, and this is all explained in the phenomenon Retroactive. A quaint little guy in a secret government lab restores dead rats to life with a memory of the fatal bait they took in his maze, by means of a Retro apparatus “that reverses the flow of time”.

The entire gag, which fills a feature-length movie, is about cleaning up the state of Texas and its “gun-toting psychopaths” to suit the pristine mind of a headshrinker for the Chicago police department, by means of her wits and a judicious Retro application.

This is naturally a parody of Groundhog Day, and also of the desert scuzzbag movie, science fiction in general, and Thelma & Louise. Morneau directs with as much untoward clumsiness as the thing will bear without positively screaming its punchline, and the actors are, under the circumstances, sublime.