Madelines

 Madeline (Brea Grant) and her husband Owen (Parry Shen) are developing a working time machine in their tiny, home-based lab. They're done with testing with fruit, but after a series of catastrophic experiments with rodents (they explode), Madeline has had enough; She solves all the problems with the device during a drunken science rampage and successfully makes a round trip to the future.

 She reappears in the lawn outside the lab, none the worse for wear. The problem: she left a loop in the code that replicated her 3600 times - and for x reason, they start coming back in a trickle: different versions of her start materializing on her back yard, one per day, day after day.

 The pair immediately decide that, because of... a very, very bone-headed interpretation of the Novikov principle, they need to kill every single Madeline as they appear. Hilarity fails to ensue.

 If you're anything like me, this pared down synopsis should be ringing all sorts of alarm bells. And yes, the science fiction in Madelines is beyond awful.
 The simple time-travel plot is bare-bones, poorly explained, and full of holes. But that's par for the course on movies about time travel; My main issue here is that script, by Brea Grant and director Jason Richard Miller seems to hold science in the most absolute contempt.

 I mean, even before they work out time travel, the duo have a machine that dematerializes objects - but they remain working for some pissant local investor (Richard Riehle). I guess that it's at least at some very under-developed level a satire of tech start-ups, but fucking hell, this is such a monumental failure of imagination. Later they have clearly stumbled onto a way to replicate matter, but absolutely nothing is made of it. It's maddening. The less said about the technological aspects, the better - the script treats these two bozos closer to wizards than scientists or engineers.

 OK, I'm being unfair, because Madelines's main goal is black comedy, not science fiction... but please, if you're going to wear another genre as drag, I'm going to ask that you demonstrate that you understand it at least at a basic level. And if you're trying to sound clever - which Madelines is clearly, desperately trying to do - it helps not to make your premise hinge on so much idiocy.

 But it's all a moot point anyhow, because the comedy also fails; The characters are awful and unlikeable, their chemistry is non-existent, the dialog goes for a stylized, clever banter that it only rarely reaches, and everyone's actions are consistently idiotic. No one acts like people in this film, no one talks like people either, and the events they're enmeshed in are just as contrived and pointlessly overcomplicated as the way they go about things

 Not all of it is a failure, mind - There are some good lines here and there (Back to the Future and Timecop are mentioned within a single sentence), and some of the ways they try to deal with the situation are amusing even as they completely defeat any possible suspension of disbelief. There are also a couple of nice props (never a given at this budget level) and the film wastes no time in getting to the meat of its story; There are plenty of pacing issues, but dawdling on the way to the main conflict is not one of them.
 Oh, and the soundtrack (by Matt Akers) is very good.

 This is what's officially called a micro-budget movie, and... well, it looks ok for what it is. The filmmaking is very amateurish and the (cheap CGI) effects are dismal. Brea Grant (who wrote and directed the excellent 12 Hour Shift) is pretty good and does what she can with a character I didn't care for at all from pretty early on - everyone else... well, they also do what they can, but achieve less.

 I don't really hold any of this against the film - it's clearly the sort of stuff that needs to be graded on a curve; The script, though, that's a much, much taller hurdle.

*: A very wooly concept that mainly just states that time travel cannot change the future; Events will sort themselves out so that there are no distortions. It's a pretty common concept in most time travel stories that don't split out into different timelines.