Lumina

by Mike McGranaghan

Lumina stands alongside The Room, Birdemic, and Manos: The Hands of Fate as one of the most jaw-droppingly awful motion pictures ever unleashed upon the public. I kept staring at the screen, thinking, “How is this even real?” Bad movies are a dime a dozen; it takes a staggering lack of talent to make something this insipid and moronic. Writer/director Gino McKoy has no ear for dialogue, no sense of characterization, and no understanding of pacing. He’s a next-gen Tommy Wiseau, although, in fairness, Wiseau didn’t also perform all the cringy pop songs on the soundtrack of his movie.

The film starts off as a very boring romantic drama. Alex (Rupert Lazarus) lives in a huge mansion with his girlfriend Tatiana (Eleanor Williams). What does he do for a living that he can afford such digs? We’re never told. At one point, someone asks him what his job is, and he simply doesn’t answer. Also living in the home – inexplicably, I might add – is his best friend Patricia (Sidney Nicole Rogers). She’s a variation on the old “magical Negro” trope in which a Black character is present solely to help a white protagonist. Another old friend, Delilah (Andrea Tivadar), has long been in love with Alex and is planning to push Tatiana out of the way in order to make a move on him.

You will not care about these cardboard characters or their dilemma one iota. Something wild takes place, though. Tatiana is abducted by aliens in full view of everyone else. She just disappears. You’d think there would be Federal agents all over the place trying to investigate something like that, but there are not. Alex grows profoundly depressed over his girlfriend’s absence. We know he’s depressed because he grows a comically large beard and starts hanging pages from supermarket tabloids all over the walls. Then he decides to go looking for Tatiana in Morocco. Patricia, Delilah, and additional friend George (Ken Lawson) join him, because they apparently don’t have jobs or lives that would preclude spontaneous trips to the middle of the desert to search for alien abductees.

From there, Lumina grows exponentially more idiotic. There’s inane dialogue, as when someone tells Alex to calm down, and he replies, “How am I supposed to calm down? My girlfriend just disappeared into thin air!” There are dumb cliches, like the “men in black,” who make their presence known by standing in the street next to their black SUVs while wearing dark suits and sunglasses. There’s an unintentionally hilarious encounter with the obligatory lone wolf who has lots of secret information about aliens. He’s played by Eric Roberts, an actor who has almost 700 credits on IMDb and who would probably show up to read this review aloud if he was paid to. I howled with laughter when it’s revealed the guy has a high-tech spaceship hidden in his shed.

Nothing about the movie works. The performances are amateurish. The screenplay is inane. The visual effects are comically cheap. Gino McKoy undermines his own story by slowing down the pace, most notably during a scene where the characters sing and dance to an entire song inside an RV, right in the middle of their supposedly urgent search for Tatiana. Worst of all is the ending - or should I say non-ending - that is so abrupt and confusing, you’re guaranteed to ask yourself, “What the hell just happened?”

Lumina is the work of someone who had the means to make a movie but not the talent to make a good one, or even a passable one. It fails on every level. In fact, the film’s Wikipedia page is infinitely more dramatic and entertaining than anything taking place onscreen. Seriously, go read it.

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