Three Corners of Deception

An often astonishingly incompetent trainwreck, Three Corners of Deception follows Meleeka Clary’s Meleeka Clary-Ghosh as she meets and falls in love with a slick hustler named Melvin and is forced to eventually take him to court. First-time filmmaker Clary, armed with her own screenplay, delivers an amateurish and aggressively unwatchable disaster that strikes all the wrong notes right from the get-go, as the movie, which runs an interminable, endless 160 minutes (!!), has been suffused with a whole host of bottom-of-the-barrel elements that cumulatively transform it into a seriously grating piece of work – with the picture’s nails-on-a-chalkboard score and raft of sub-community-theater performances merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of its inept attributes. (Clary herself, in terms of the latter, does little to offset the pervasively unpleasant atmosphere, as the writer/director offers up as abhorrent and objectionable a turn as one can easily recall.) It’s clear, too, that Three Corners of Deception‘s wildly uninvolving vibe is perpetuated by Clary’s ongoing reliance on eye-rollingly absurd plot developments (eg Meleeka loses custody of her child because her IQ isn’t as high as her former partner’s), and it goes without saying, obviously, that the crowd-pleasing bent of the film’s final stretch is hardly able to pack the satisfying, rewarding punch for which Clary is undoubtedly striving. And although the decision to cast different actors depending on Melvin’s mood and attitude is certainly intriguing, Three Corners of Deception is, otherwise and for the most part, an entirely worthless endeavor of Ed Woodian proportions that is, in the final analysis, a strong candidate for the worst movie ever made. (It’s just that bad, ultimately.)

no stars out of ****