Oh! Squints - Does this movie exist?

September 17, 2022 3:33 PM

On the IMDB page for director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, The Wicker Man, etc), we see he's apparently directed a movie called "Oh! Squints" plus two sequels. There's no ratings, no trailer, no screen grabs. Only one review which states "None of these movies exist. I've looked into this and the other sequels and I'm not convinced this movie was ever filmed or exists." Google fails to turn anything up, and the only evidence is the end credits on YouTube, uploaded over a number of years for movie 1, movie 2, movie 3, each of which has tens of thousands of views. What is going on here?

As far as I can work out, they're Singaporean remakes of the "Sandlot" baseball movies.

No mention of these on the Sandlot Franchise wikipedia page, or Neil LaBute's page, but the Singaporean actors have it listed in their entries.

There's a poster with a dead URL on it, that frankly looks really fake.

There's also this video from a channel doing weird memes / glitch video art consisting of a "remastered" version of the credits pointing a camera at the previous youtube credits... so perhaps there's some prank / meme nonsense at some level here?

So then...

I'm leaning towards these (maybe) being real movies, but if so, what should I do differently to find them?

Or if it is a hoax, why such a long game and so under the radar? Is it just some crappy in-joke from some podcast I've never heard?

What's up with uploading just the end credits, and why do they have so many views? Is that a meme thing / bot thing / test of something? Or do people really want to watch the end credits only for some reason?

posted by iivix to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

Unauthorized with all unsold copies buried or dumped somewhere under threat of litigation would be my guess. So no, you won't find them, unless you want to hunt for tape traders. Again, just a guess.
posted by Stuka at 4:33 PM on September 17, 2022

I wrote, produced, and directed a feature film in 1994. In the 2000s, I realized it wasn't on IMDB so I decided to add it. To do so, I had to prove to IMDB that it existed by providing links to third party outlets mentioning it (reviews, etc.). It was a bit of a pain in the ass (the web wasn't what it is in 1994).

What I mean to say is that there's a process to getting things on the IMDB, and it's not simple. Whoever created these entries had to prove to the those vetting at the IMDB that they exist. Variety announcements of casting; reviews from legit critices; etc.

Doesn't mean it's not a hoax but...
posted by dobbs at 5:07 PM on September 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

There was recently a fairly substantial takedown on Substack regarding fake IMDb credits.

The poster you linked to claims that the soundtrack was published by Varèse Sarabande, who have a fairly prominent web site, and no mention whatsoever of the "Oh! Squints" movies.

It seems pretty likely that the credits you linked to are in service of "providing proof" of existence of the movie for IMDb scammers, even though no such movie exists (it's not that hard to provide a fake credits scroll) - and Neil LaBute simply hasn't been paying enough attention to his IMDb profile to report it.
posted by eschatfische at 8:16 PM on September 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's a poster with a dead URL on it

Wayback Machine reckons it was never alive. There's a single crawl hit for the domain name from 2018: "Account disabled by server administrator".
posted by some little punk in a rocket at 8:27 PM on September 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I checked out the credits for Oh! Squints III and it sure looks like a joke to me. The first two and a half minutes are sponsorship logos for everything from law firms to Subway, then when those finally fade away and you think the actual credits are going to start scrolling they just scroll more sponsorship logos. It's literally three minutes of logos! Admittedly I don't know Singaporean cinema very well and maybe that's something they actually do in the credits of their films, but the endless parade of logos made me think of a Tim and Eric gag. The Wicker Man has become such a huge meme as this infamously awful film, so I can imagine somebody putting LaBute's name on this as a kind of meta-joke.

But LaBute is listed here with two "co-directors," so I suppose it's possible he agreed to put his name on some cheapo foreign films for funding purposes and the other guys actually did the work. If this thing is real it's hard to imagine LaBute was involved in any substantial way, but when you look at the filmography of almost anybody in Hollywood there will be a few weird little projects you just can't believe. (Who would've thought that the guys behind Twin Falls, Idaho would go on to make the cheesy AF fembot sex comedy Hot Bot?) It's just barely possible that LaBute took some quickie, under-the-radar gigs in Singapore to pay off a house or something.

So... I dunno. This sure doesn't sound real, but movies that sounded a lot less real have been real.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 12:50 AM on September 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Did you watch these credits? Oh! Squints stars Colin Farrell, and guest stars Chris Rock, Luke Perry, and Samuel L. Jackson. Warwick Davis and Verne Troyer are listed as EXTRAS. The sequel adds Michelle Rodriguez, Jeremey Renner, Guy Pearce, Cameron Diaz, and David Cross. And many many others. All three have music by Hans Zimmer.

Quite safe to say these are not real movies.
posted by steveminutillo at 12:25 PM on September 19, 2022

Best answer: Huh. Yeah, I gave up after the endless parade of sponsorship logos and missed that spectacularly eclectic cast. So it's obviously fake, but I still don't know what the heck it's about. It's kind of joke-shaped, but somebody went to a lot of trouble to put these credits together and post IMDB entries for three films. It might be somebody's scam attempt to pad their IMDB resume, or maybe it's the work of a delusional person who is convinced they worked on this big movie with every famous person ever. Maybe some bored 15-year-old kid made these credits screwing around in Premiere Pro and posted them on Youtube, where they found a weird fandom. It's a real puzzler.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 1:23 PM on September 20, 2022