https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr4wmvRmQ20One of the best-looking films in Park City, Dante's Inferno, is probably also the first feature drawn in crayon. Sean Meredith's super-elaborate puppet show, which premiered at Slamdance, features cardboard characters on strings and wires and wondrously detailed, deep-focus sets. The story: a modern-day Dante and Virgil take a whirlwind tour of the circles of Hell, where they see signs for fast food chains, baddies forever stuck in ice, Fox News reporters and Strom Thurmond in a Mrs. Buttersworth costume. There's even a decent Halliburton joke. Alas, bad film writing will be prominent in my own personal Circle of Hell, and the film's painfully adolescent dialogue nearly killed me. Bad puns and belabored explanations are the coin of this realm, along with repeated jokes about Styx (the band) and pot smoking. Still, long after losing interest in the plot (it's really a 70-minute catalogue of bad people) and being inflamed by the film's condemnation of gays and Muslims to Eternal Fire (this is, after all, still Dante), I couldn't take my eyes off it.
