Movie Review: Motion Picture Purgatory — “Mister Limbo”

Guy tumbles under a damaged parachute, a skydiving blur, and wakes up the in the middle of the desert. He doesn’t know how he got here. He only knows he’s got no cell service.

And then he (Hugo de Souza) meets the more sedentary stoner (Vig Norris) who wakes up in his bathrobe. And then they’re hailed by another stoner (Cameron Dye) who’s even more demented.

This stranger and that one cross their paths. They all speak in the gobbledygook of self-absorbed unself-aware California-ese. Or maybe they’re quoting that song by Lauryn Hill.

“Everything is everything!”

The only food seems to be in the guys’ hallucinations. Their water? Long gone. Days and days pass.

Sounds like hell, right? Or maybe purgatory?

“The 4400!” the bathrobed fellow who decides he seems like a “Craig” declares. He starts laying out the plot to the skydiver and they debate its similarities to their as they aimlessly trek, trying to figure out where they are or even who they are.

So, “The 4400” it is? Nah, it’s even less interesting than that. Call it “Mister Limbo.” No wonder the other stoner wanders off.

Whatever promise there is in this well-worn existentialist premise starts to dissipate once the first guy meets the second, and the attention steadily fades the more characters in search of an exit — or a GPS fix — that they meet on their journey.

On their walks, and at night around a campfire, the skydiver who might be called “Enrico” thanks to the accent that comes and goes and Craig ponder life and God and self-worth and goodness and failings, theirs and others’ in a not-quite-definable accent that comes and goes.

“I went to church,” Craig recalls. “What does that say about me?”

I tried like hell to do the right thing,” Enrico fruitlessly offers.

There’s nothing more to “Mister Limbo than that. And even a glib faux Pirandello swipe at the meaning of life and the life summation that comes with death should be deeper or at least more engrossing than this.

Rating: unrated, profanity, drug use discussed

Cast: Hugo de Souza, Vig Norris, Cameron Dye, Amy Hoerler, Jennifer Kennedy and Heidi Luo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert G. Putka. A Terror Films release.

Running time:

About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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