It's Been Too Long

The scouts

A micro-budget '90s neo-noir sex-thriller parody that knows exactly how ridiculous its own premise is—absurdist confessions trading places with seduction tropes until the whole thing collapses into something genuinely unhinged. This is the kind of film that makes you wonder why more people aren't just... making weird stuff like this.

Schaefer's satirical riff on Basic Instinct and Poison Ivy works as pastiche precisely because it respects the formal grammar of the films it's mocking—the editing rhythms, the close-ups, the narrative machinery—before subverting them with increasingly baroque absurdism.

The entire film hinges on the escalating confession conceit, and what makes it sing is the willingness to let the performances get weirder and more committed with each revelation rather than undercut the bit—that tonal trust from director to actor is everything at this scale.