St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase: BEST LAID SCHEMES

The St Louis-lensed BEST LAID SCHEMES is a twisted new rom-com that’s surprising on many levels. In his previous feature film THE PATH OF TORMENT, writer/director Gary Warren played a smiling but demented Mormon missionary on a door-to-door calling of torture, murder, and depravity. When Warren said his follow-up was a romantic comedy, I thought he was putting me on. While watching BEST LAID SCHEMES, I kept waiting for the story to take a turn for the gory or perverse, but it never did as Warren has made a fairly straightforward romantic tale of two people who weren’t meant to be together….. though one with plenty of dick-and-fart jokes! Warren, who understands that if you’ve got no budget you’d better have a good script, should not only be commended for going in a different direction for his sophomore feature effort but for pulling it off as well as he does.

At one point or another we’ve all been upset with the opposite sex. Maybe some of us have even thought of ways of taking revenge and that’s the theme of BEST LAID SCHEMES. Warren plays an eccentric named Greg, a professional clown who longs for Anna (Christina Rios), a woman he loved twelve years earlier but was engaged then. She’s engaged again now but Greg is determined to seduce her, and then break her heart in retaliation for her long-ago snub. After a hilarious scene with her family, the two go out on a friendly date where Greg gets his friends to secretly pose as bullies, muggers, and scorned girlfriends all to impress Anna. His plan, his best-laid scheme, works perfectly until he has a change of heart.

The look of BEST LAID SCHEMES is ultra low-budget – some of the lighting is flat and the camera work could be cleaner, but Warren is clever with his editing without getting carried away and the shoestring production values can’t compromise the clever script or the story’s professional structure. His dialogue is sharp and incisive as he parades the worst aspects of male chauvinism with pride. Often these no-budget indies seem obligated to pad to feature length to qualify for certain fests and BEST LAID SCHEMES did drag a bit at 97 minutes but that was due more to technical limitations than recognition of unnecessary filler. The cast all give impressive performances. Gary Warren, who’s constantly on-screen, brings depth to the charming-but-vengeful mastermind Greg. Warren was the best thing about THE PATH OF TORMENT but this time he has the sense to surround himself with better actors. Christina Rios is fine as Anna, Joe Moskus scores as Gary’s best friend and partner in crime, but it’s an actress named Jane Hohlstein who’s the real scene-stealer as Anna’s horny, foul-mouthed mom.

BEST LAID SCHEMES has its missteps. The character of Anna, though well enough acted by Ms Rios, doesn’t have that drop-dead charisma for me to believe she’d be the target of Greg’s 12-year obsession. With his chicanery, and wit, it seems Greg would have been able to trick plenty of more worthy women and this fixation didn’t quite ring true. She doesn’t seem deserving of the emotional abuse Greg plans on heaping on her, but then Warren plays Greg as something of a psycho wise-guy clown anyway, so perhaps his deranged motives are all in his head. Greg may be selfish and his goal cruel but he’s fun to be around and ultimately this love story is a devastating critique of the male ego, as he becomes a victim of his own arrested development and the whole thing ends on a satisfying goof. If a movie’s goal is to entertain the audience, make them laugh, make them spend an hour and a half rejoicing in an enthusiastic young filmmaker doing his job well, then BEST LAID SCHEMES reached its goal.

BEST LAID SCHEMES plays at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase  at 7pm Monday July 19 at the Tivoli Theatre.