VOD Review: The Flying Scissors

I've long been a fan of mockumentaries, especially those that skewer deserving subjects while also skewering the sometimes overly earnest art of documentary filmmaking. The Flying Scissors, a mockumentary about the world of competitive rock, paper, scissors, occasionally succeeds at both. But despite an amusing premise and some likeably quirky characters, most of the film's humor falls flat.

The Flying Scissors -- released this week on Austin's Time-Warner Video on Demand, Amazon VOD, and other online VOD sites -- follows a dozen or so competitors in a rock, paper, scissors championship tournament, developing each character via the standard documentary mix of interviews and scenes of them going about their daily lives. Per documentary (and thus mockumentary) convention, the characters are a diverse group of socially inept oddballs, lifelong underachievers, and hyper-competitive types who have little in common except their obsession with a "sport" that no one outside the group seems to appreciate. More importantly, they also share a desire to succeed at something in their lives.

For example, hapless real-estate agent Frank Johnson (Todd Susman) lives in a tiny, trashy apartment but proudly shows off the equally tiny trophy he won at a previous tournament. Emasculated househusband Phil Stevens (Mason Pettit) hopes that winning the tournament will give his pushy wife Amy (Kerry O'Malley) a reason to respect him. Ardent feminist Leslie Hanrahan (Susan O'Connor) wants a victory for womyn everywhere, and vapid Christian beauty queen Anna Carlson (Sarah Wheeler) hopes a victory will somehow jumpstart her nonexistent acting career and/or bring her closer to Jesus.

The characters are surprisingly well developed for a film that is, after all, a joke. Fully two-thirds of the movie is devoted to fleshing out the competitors and the tournament's unhealthily type-A organizers, Alan Pope (Matthew Arkin) and David Sanderg (Benim Foster). The film's long-overdue climax is, of course, the tournament, which is hastily relocated to a B-grade hotel in White Plains, New York when the original venue -- Madison Square Garden -- dumps the rock, scissors, paper event in favor of a far more exciting coin tossing tournament.

Given the premise's comic potential, it's a shame that most of the jokes in The Flying Scissors simply aren't funny. The characters may be odd people engaging in a silly pastime, but they seldom say or do funny things. Beauty queen Carlson delivers the film's best lines ("I want to thank God -- the real god, not the Jewish one or the turban one"), and an aside about how the Iraq war was improperly marketed is cynically amusing. But most scenes go nowhere, and the dialogue generates few laughs. Oddly, The Flying Scissors works far better as a study of obsessive behavior and the human desire for affirmation than as a comedy.

To its credit, The Flying Scissors does benefit from an experienced cast. The most familiar face is Susman, whose 40-year career includes hundreds of film, television, and theatrical roles (most famously, he was one of the unseen PA announcers on M*A*S*H). Susman gives the film's most nuanced and sympathetic performance as the sad-sack Johnson. Another familiar face is Arkin (son of Alan and brother of Adam), who is suitably smarmy as marketing executive Pope. And although Wheeler has few film credits, she displays great comic timing as the breathtakingly untalented and vacuously devout Carlson.

Extras: The only DVD special feature is the film trailer, which accurately portrays The Flying Scissors as a disappointingly unfunny film based on a funny idea.