Lumina

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There are bad movies, there are really bad movies, and then there’s “Lumina,” a film so breathtaking in its overall incompetence that one starts to wonder if it’s not intentionally so in the hope of being the next “The Room” or “Birdemic.” How else to explain some of the laughable shot choices, inconsistent characters, nonsensical plotting, and dialogue that sounds like it was either produced by A.I. or Google Translate of a script written in another language? One of the hardest working men in the history of his industry, Eric Roberts, pops in and out for a matter of minutes, able to elevate the flick slightly with his playful line readings before even his scene gets sucked into the tractor beam of idiocy that this film seems to willfully embrace. Roberts has notoriously made over 700 films in his notable career – it’s hard to believe many are worse than this one.

“Lumina” opens like a relationship drama, introducing us to a couple named Alex (Rupert Lazarus) and Tatiana (Eleanor Williams). An old flame named Delilah (Andrea Tivador) is the woman who might come between them, but aliens put a pin in that plotting when they suddenly abduct Tatiana, who disappears in a flurry of truly poor CGI, leaving Alex so heartbroken that he grows a hideously fake beard and turns down his already flat performance to almost nothing. A shot wherein Alex stares into his pool and sees a vision of the missing Tatiana like Carl Weathers in the clouds at the end of “Happy Gilmore” made me yelp out loud. It’s one of many choices that feels like it has to be intentionally funny.

Before you know it, Alex, Delilah, Patricia (Sidney Nicole Rogers), and George (Ken Lawson) are venturing around the world to find Tatiana. It leads them into the grips of a mysterious alien abduction expert named Thom, the aforementioned extended cameo by Roberts, whose day of shooting here clearly happened just to get funding for the film and ends in a chase sequence of stunning lunacy.

Our quartet hits the road again, meeting with Tatiana’s parents about her history of alien abductions (that she never mentioned to the love of her life, of course), traveling through a desert, and ending up in an underground facility that might be governmental or alien or whatever. But it’s impossible to care by that point. And the janky CGI in which characters and what’s threatening them almost never share the same space doesn’t help.

Where does one even begin to talk about “Lumina”? Some scenes feel like they’ll never end – it’s 112 minutes! Others clearly weren’t completely shot, leading to jumpy edits because the film lacks normal plot transitions. None of it makes a lick of sense, so picking out specific WTF scenes feels like a waste of time, but there’s one involving a goat that I’ll never forget.

Again, maybe that’s the point. I certainly remember “The Room” more than most of the bad movies made that same year or even decade. And I’ll remember “Lumina” as one reflects on a memorable nightmare about being abducted by aliens. Honestly, that would probably be more fun.