Watch Out
Director: Steve Balderson
Writer: Joseph Suglia
Cinematographer: Steve Balderson
Cast: Matt Riddlehoover
Running Time: 90 min.
Steve Balderson’s Watch Out, based on the verbally brilliant debut novel by Joseph Suglia, is infused with the chromatic sensibility of Argento, Fellini, and Godard, but many will immediately compare it to David Lynch. Watch Out is the story of Jonathan Barrows, “professor of intelligent thinking.” Abandoned since birth on an alien planet called “Earth,” Barrows travels west by train to Benton Harbor, Michigan—a town with “a well-deserved inferiority complex”—in search of the “unholy grail”: a teaching position at Benton Harbor Community College (“the only college that would grant Me an interview”). Attracted to his own body, Barrows carries out an intimate relationship with a blowup doll that resembles him, and takes pleasure in rejecting the advances of his many admirers. Finding himself surrounded and hounded by the residents of Benton Harbor, he inexorably descends into a world of carnivorous priests and Prozac-popping Polish prostitutes, and eventually assassinates the world’s most popular pop diva. Every human being, according to Barrows, is a form of nourishment. “You strange creatures,” Barrows declares, “you are nothing more to Me than a meal at the fast-food restaurant of life.” But who will end up being devoured?
