Set in a future that looks almost exactly like the present, Animal Room is a Clockwork Orange knockoff, originally filmed in 1995, about an LSD-loving malcontent (Neil Patrick Harris) placed in the titular room as part of a high-school program for juvenile delinquents. It's a controversial program—in part because it seems to entail nothing more than sticking a handful of hoodlums in a room with a VCR—that brings him into conflict with the leader (Matthew Lillard) of a gang of toughs. A slapdash mixture of Z-grade exploitation and laughable pretension, Animal Room takes place in a nightmarish dystopia where teenagers drink and use drugs, no one pays attention in school, and violence can strike anywhere, even during low-budget recording sessions for the post-Danzig Misfits. When not stealing blatantly (and badly) from A Clockwork Orange—in one scene, Lillard and his gang terrorize a wheelchair-bound man and his pretty wife—writer-director Craig Singer alternates shakily between brutish nastiness and pathetic attempts at social commentary. The only distinctive feature about Animal Room, beyond the puzzling Misfits cameo, is its pervasive homoerotic overtones. The barely implicit subtext manifests itself not only in Lillard's frequent "violent" manhandling of Harris, but also in the fey Harris' tender bond with his effeminate therapist and close relationship with a hunky football player who wants to take him on a (no doubt platonic) Caribbean cruise. Camp aficionados should appreciate the handful of scenes in which Harris wigs out on acid inside an empty theater, in part because his trips look and feel like orange-tinted White Zombie videos, but Animal Room fails even as camp.
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