His latest opus is titled “Yeast Lords’’ and we regularly dive into its pages to see it played out as a joyfully dreadful sci-fi action film, with Sam Rockwell cast as Benjy’s macho hero Bronco. (Remember the 1974 Sean Connery flop “Zardoz’’? Like that but with lousier hair.) These scenes are almost the best part of “Gentlemen Broncos’’ - a consciously crummy homage to the works of Ed Wood mixed with pure hormonal angst.
The very best part of the movie would be Jemaine Clement, from HBO’s “Flight of the Conchords,’’ as Dr. Ronald Chevalier, a mega-selling sci-fi novelist and full-time prat who suggests “Saturday Night Live’’ comedian Fred Armisen’s impersonation of Carl Sagan in all his turtleneck-wearing Mensa-geek glory. Coming upon Benjy’s manuscript at a teen writers’ conference, Chevalier swipes it, renames the characters, and has another hit. What will the boy do?
Not a lot, it turns out. If “Gentlemen Broncos’’ has any dramatic arc at all, it’s Benjy slowly coming out of his passive shell - so slowly that you may not buy it when it finally happens. Hess is another of those filmmakers who enjoys piling woe upon his heroes in the form of obnoxious supporting characters: a user of a love interest (Halley Feiffer), a mincing and bizarrely grimacing Latino rich kid (Héctor Jiménez) who wants to turn “Yeast Lords’’ into his own video production. (He’s this movie’s Pedro and exactly as desperate as that sounds.)
The writer-actor-director Mike White shows up in one scene as an anemic longhair named Dusty with a white anaconda wrapped around his shoulders. The snake defecates explosively on his shirt. Hess gets his gross-out shock-laugh but the moment sums up the general approach: Collect a group of oddballs and take a dump on them. He and his wife/co-writer Jerusha create such cartoons you can’t even bring yourself to dislike them - they’re there simply to be gawked at.
