Chompy & the Girls

 Jackson (Christy St. John) is introduced trying to kill herself. Her depression is real, and the movie does give it weight, but the botched suicide is a brilliant bit of gallows humor, impeccably acted and shot.

 In the aftermath, re-evaluating her life, Jackson decides to reach out to her biological father, Sam (Steve Marvel) for the first time in her life. This comes as a shock to the poor guy, who didn't even suspect he had a twenty-something year old daughter.

 Jackson and Sam arrange to meet at a park, and it's just as awkward as you'd expect - but the reunion is interrupted when they witness a man (Reggie Koffman) distend his jaws until his mouth is about half his height, grab a little girl, and swallow her whole; Jackson and her father, understandably horrified, take off their own separate ways.

 But Jackson will not let it go; She goes back and enlists Sam in a hare-brained attempt to figure out what's going on, hoping her dealer (Hari Williams), who's a bit of an occult nut, will know what to make of things. That's even before realizing that big mouth (whom they get to calling Chompy) seems to be chasing them down, or before they run into a little girl (Seneca Paliotta) who's an identical copy of the one they saw get eaten. As the night advances, they discover that the universe itself may be at risk.

 Chompy & the Girls is a willfully bizarre no-budget exercise, a completely deadpan stoner-friendly comedy that grafts weird other-worldly menace to an earnest indie drama. It spends just as much time on its home-grown supernatural elements as it does on Jackson and Sam's relationship, or Sam's realization that maybe his marriage is not in a good place. There are no jokes - the humor is mostly based on quirky reactions, the funniest resulting from the film's more surrealistic elements.

 It's a very likeable movie. The characters are well rounded out and well-acted, even when their reaction to the strangeness invading their lives might be a bit too blasé, and the script (by director Skye Braband) manages to coax a coherent strand of themes from the story's disparate threads - compassion and the need for communication chief among them.

 While the film's weird cosmology ends up making sense, the plot progression stumbles a couple of times, and the pacing - initially surprisingly tight - gets a bit muddled later on. There are only a couple of visual effects, neither of them very good, but the main one - Chompy's giant kisser - is as grotesque as it's ridiculous.

 I ended up liking the movie a lot, but I don't want to hype it too much; It's definitely one that's better approached with low expectations.