Nobody makes movies quite like actor, writer, producer, and director Eric Schaeffer, and filmgoers everywhere should be eternally grateful. There are plenty of bad independent filmmakers, but no one comes close to matching Schaeffer's unique mixture of Henry Miller-level pretension, Woody Allen-level ego, and sub-Tony Roberts-level talent. A singularly unappealing performer, Schaeffer made his solo directorial debut with 1996's If Lucy Fell, a tortured bit of whimsy in which the balding auteur had to choose between Elle Macpherson and Sarah Jessica Parker. He followed it with 1997's surreally awful Fall, in which Schaeffer played a cabdriver so gifted in the erotic arts that he could make frightening supermodel Amanda De Cadenet experience shattering orgasms through fully clothed dry humping. Schaeffer plays a character afflicted with a variety of sexual disorders in Wirey Spindell, but that doesn't prevent him from being propositioned by twins, a beautiful dancer, a transvestite model, his cousin, and countless others spellbound by his nonexistent charm. As the film opens, he's three days away from getting married to Callie Thorne, a woman he loves dearly but with whom he can't have sex. This causes him to reflect upon his life, and the remainder of Wirey Spindell consists largely of flashbacks, as Schaeffer documents in a hideously overwritten voiceover how he progressed from a sex-and-drug-addled child to a sex-and-drug-addled teen to a sober-but-sex-obsessed adult. If it were more widely seen, the line it draws from substance abuse to Eric Schaeffer-like behavior could turn an entire generation off drugs, but Wirey Spindell, like its predecessors, seems designed solely for consumption by Schaeffer and a few of his friends. The cinematic equivalent of a bad first novel, it's a rambling, self-indulgent, misogynist mess. And though Schaeffer is thankfully off-screen most of the time, his voice—pseudo-poetic, whiny, self-pitying, and full of unearned self-importance and vapid self-absorption—permeates the entire film. Long, shapeless, and painfully unfunny, Wirey Spindell confirms its maker's status as one of the most distinctively awful filmmakers of his generation.
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