Project Dorothy

It was with a bit of hesitation that I sat down to watch the 2024 sci-fi thriller titled "Project Dorothy", as I happened to stumble upon it by random chance. I had never heard about the movie, but I have to say that the movie's cover and synopsis just wasn't really doing much of making it seem like a stellar movie.

Regardless, I opted to give the movie a fair chance, on account of it being a movie that I hadn't already seen. So in a sense, then I suppose writers George Henry Horton and Ryan Scaringe had every opportunity to entertain and impress me with their movie.

The storyline concocted by writers George Henry Horton and Ryan Scaringe proved rather bland. It was a movie that I had problems submerging myself into, because it was just hard to take it serious. Growling forklifts? What's up with that? And the movie just didn't have an ounce of being as high tech as the synopsis made it out to be.

Needless to say that I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie. The acting performances were fair, but you're not in for anything grand here. It was a small cast ensemble, so the actors and actresses had to put on more convincing performances to carry the movie.

Visually then you're not in for any grand spectacle of special effects. It was a rather low tech and low key movie in terms of special effects.

I was not particularly entertained by the movie, as I happen to not find unseen things moving about and growling as proper entertainment, nor do I consider lights being continuously switched on and off as being entertaining.

While "Project Dorothy" wasn't an impressive movie, I have to say that I've sat through worse sci-fi thrillers than what director George Henry Horton delivered here. This movie was one where you just disconnect your brain and blankly watch the screen, as it offers nothing to think about.

My rating of "Project Dorothy" lands on a very generous three out of ten stars.

I used to trust the score on here when a film had over 1k votes. Well, not anymore. This film has almost 2k votes and this (at the time of writing this) was a high 5 score, which is good for a horror. This however, is not good, not good at all.

This is so poor. Its so low budget, the film goes nowhere, and to say this is a horror is a big stretch. It's a 2 at best, I wasted an hour on this, and hour I won't get back. I presume whoever made the film, had a contact that owned a huge factory that they could use to film in, the factory is the only impressive part of the film. With such a good location, this is a huge waste and they could have done something decent.

An idiot kid and his father figure partner in crime bungle through an encounter with a sexily diabolical female AI who wants to get high on some WiFi. She controls the lighting, door locks and forklifts in a ridiculously vast factory/warehouse and taunts the dumb and dumber duo who stumble into her domain. The idiot kid's acting is so bad it becomes unbearably annoying. The father figure partner in crime is a better actor but has nothing much to work with besides a gunshot wound in the leg which becomes quite a nuisance for him as well as for the viewing audience. Somehow still watchable, it portrays an eerie element mixed in with occasional unintentional hilarity.

I would rather watch weekday, daytime TV over this nonsense... like "My 900 pound life" type of daytime TV. See, I'm normally into quirky types of "B" movies, but this is... quite honestly one of the worst 'films' I have seen in a long, long time. To be fair, I have to put a disclaimer that I saw only about half of it. My whole family agreed we'd rather just watch the Stargate Atlantis rerun that was running on SyFy, so we switched off to that, but I gave it at least a good 40 minutes before I gave up. I'm not sure if you can even call it a film, tbh. I am not exaggerating when I say this has the feel of something I've seen my peers create in Movies class in high school in the late 90s. But they didn't even use Window Movie Maker effects. The production value, effects, and acting are way, way below your typical Matlock episode. It literally seems like a couple of 'bros' got together in a bar and got drunk and decided to make a scifi movie for the hell of it. "uhh huh huh huh dude, yeah man, you should totally make a scifi man, and make sure you give the thing like a hot female face, that always works" . Another way you can look at it is if you were playing the original Half Life and just wandering around Mesa without actually doing anything or encountering anything. My spouse joked that it looks like Iowa Farmland, and although initially I took it as a joke, I became fully convinced that's exactly what they did. It seems like they found an old decommissioned or possibly abandoned car manufacturing plant, as well as a abandoned office building from the 90's +/- 10 years, and just filmed the whole thing there. The initial shots showed car painting/manufacturing robots with literally zero post processing done besides like film grain and upping the contrast. They wander around a large cubicle type of office floor which had been cleared completely of all technology. They placed a couple of old computers on like 2 of the cubicles (out of like 50). The AI's "interface" special effect was literally nothing more than left centered Console Font text in green... There seems to be some sort of AI type entity somewhere in the complex, and that red face you see in the movie posters is literally the ONLY shot they have of the thing. It blinks... Opens and closes it's mouth... looks around. This is worse than stock footage, or maybe that's what it is. You see the camera, on multiple and numerous occasions just sneak up on the characters, as if something is coming up behind them, but it's nothing. Ever. Like how many times can you use a stupid plot device like that? I'm sorry, I just can't... I'll stop now...

This film does a lot with very little. It's not a big-budget CGI-laden flick or all-star cast A24-style production, but you never get the sense it's trying to be. It's rather an exercise in budget minimalism within the action-thriller genre, a class of film where operating with little budget is incredibly challenging. In that, it surpasses all expectations.

The first thing that stands out is the acting, which stands up admirably against any action thriller, but is head and shoulders above performances in other action B movies. As a lover of this genre, I can tell you that the performances in these kinds of movies are often an afterthought, if not altogether scorned by the cast and crew. In Project Dorothy by contrast, the performances between the film's two stars (Tim DeZarn plays an aging criminal mentor to Adam Budron's character, Blake) feel multilayered, yet natural. The film is not a dialogue-first character piece, but it does interweave a good character-to-character subplot below the main brunt of action and suspense, something movies with 10X this film's budget so often fail to do.

The writing also holds up well, with dialogue not feeling forced or over-engineered, and a pacing structure that neither feels too fast nor too slow (another common pitfall of the genre).

Lastly, the directing deserves a lot of praise for, again, doing a lot with very little. Keeping an entire film within the confines of an abandoned warehouse is not an easy task for an easily bored action-thriller viewer base (I count myself among them), but the film at no point feels boring or rushed. There are brief moments of camp or that require a brief suspension of disbelief (why is there no dust in the warehouse, for example), but among the pantheon of sins this genre is known for, these are easily forgiven and forgotten, and all in all, I was having far too much fun to care.

All in all, this film does an impressive with incredibly little. Hats off to the filmmakers for their efficiency and skill in taking what should have been another wooden micro-budget B-movie, and making it a fun, engaging, and at times even heartfelt story.