There was a hysteria last summer surrounding the impending release of Snakes on a Plane, because bloggers and film buffs alike had been waiting so long for for a truly modern camp masterpiece. You know the type— those shallow, extravagant, but unforgettable B-movies that become cult classics mostly on the basis of their sheer absurdity: Blacula, Xanadu, anything derided on “Mystery Science Theater” or lauded in one of Quentin Tarantino’s movies. Pulp Fiction, in fact, is in part responsible for this specific genre of cult classics almost vanishing for the past ten years.

There have been B-movies since Pulp Fiction— oh, how there have been shitty films— but Tarantino brought about a sea change that changed the landscape of bad moies. By expressing his love for the absurdist conventions of so many bygone camp classics, he created a sense of hyper-awareness about those selfsame dazzling, creative elements in B-cinema.

Wes Craven’s Scream is equally culpable for bringing this double-edged sword of self-awareness to modern B-movies. Scream made filmic meta-criticism an extremely popular parlor trick, and inadvertantly spawned a whole franchise of films (starting with Scary Movie and continuing with no end in sight) devoted solely to the purpose of lampooning genre films.

This new era of heightened awareness has in effect forced genre films to walk a tight-rope between bland, straightforward believability, and tired, reference-dependent satire. The original movies that come out these days don’t dare risk getting their toes wet in the land of reckless creativity. They’re afraid of being called out on their capricious, irrational natures, as if cinematic indulgence were a bad thing. People just don’t like their fiction to be as fake these days, and they like even less for their reality to be real.

But, I digress. What I’m trying to get to here is Richard Kelly’s new film, Southland Tales. This seemingly disastrous disaster film will be all that Snakes on a Plane promised to be (yet failed to deliver, succumbing to a constant barrage of winks and nudges to let us know that it was in on the joke), and more. Here’s the trailer:

Can you smell what The Rock is cooking? Sorry, I couldn’t not write that. Southland Tales is Kelly’s directorial follow-up to 2001’s cult classic Donnie Darko. Someone noticed how popular Darko was with the kids these days and decided to give Richard Kelly, a former frat boy and graduate of the University of Florida, 17 million dollars and complete artistic license for a follow-up. Five years later, the nearly three-hour long film premiered at Cannes, to nearly universally awful reviews.

My favorite bit of angry wordsmithery on Southland Tales comes from TimeOut London’s Geoff Andrews:

“Kelly’s interminable, incoherent and profoundly unrewarding apocalyptic sci-fi satire comes across as a messy mix of ideas (I use the word very loosely) filched from the Bible (Dwayne Johnson as JC, anyone?), ‘La Dolce Vita’, ‘Metropolis’… and might that be ‘The Fifth Element’ in there, too? Morally and metaphysically confused, unfunny, heavy-handed, and as prone to waste, excess, idiocy and decadence as the emphatically allegorical world it imagines, it comes across as the dopehead nerd hipster’s alternative to ‘The Da Vinci Code’.

To quote a far less verbose source, a commenter on IMDb said that Southland Tales “felt like the longest, most expensive student film I’ve ever seen.” That’s kind of how I felt, just watching the trailer. The humor is cringeworthy (“You’re gonna have to wear a bullet-proof vest.”), the acting looks obnoxious, the dialogue is melodramatic (“It had to be this way.” “I know.”), and it’s packed with the kind of set pieces and guns-blazing blow ‘em up action numbers (mixed, of course, with pseudo-philosophical ruminations) that you’d expect from a college student’s screenplay.

Now, maybe I’ll be proved wrong and Southland Tales really is a well-crafted, prescient, high-octane sci-fi social satire comparable only to Mulholland Drive, as J. Hoberman declared in the Village Voice— but I hope it isn’t, and here’s why: This could be a self-important postmodern version of The Apple, a post-Tarantino Waterworld— a new direction in contemporary camp film. I’m strangely excited about this fun-looking, over-the-top, high-budget mess. I’m hoping it’ll combine the silly Hong Kong heavy-handedness of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle— one of my favorite guilty pleasures— with the sense of juvenile pseudo-philosophical pretentiousness that Richard Kelly taught us all to love in Donnie Darko. I want my absurdity to take itself seriously— I don’t want it to be laughing along with me. Delusions of grandeur plus frat boy plus 17 million dollars equals retarded cinematic fun!