The Big Raincheck

A collage consisting of fragments of a 1981 movie shot on three-quarter-inch videotape, mixed with the following (all shot in 2015): documentary interviews about the history of the old movie; a fictional story about a young director who begins a film, abandons it, then returns to it decades later; and a set of wild improvisations in which various interpretations of how the old, unfinished film was meant to be completed are portrayed. In the fictional story which frames this movie, a young filmmaker begins shooting his first feature in Austin with people he knows. He has one close friend who inspires him to make this film. She is the first of his circle to die of the unfolding AIDS epidemic. She eventually comes back, decades later, to inspire him to finish the film he had abandoned so long ago. From the fragments that survive, the original film seems to have been about a crazed heiress searching for a lost brother who has allegedly been transformed into a zombie. Her search takes her on a journey where she encounters crooked detectives, a delusional psychiatrist, a moronic tour guide, and Communist spies masquerading as Hollywood big shots.