Crumb Catcher

Promising more than it is able to deliver, it’s a case of a genre indie that stops short of becoming a kitschy B Grade classic.

If you can withstand spending nearly two hours in the company of these grating, argumentative characters, there are rewards to be had in a skillfully wrought, twisty suspense tale.

The title of “Crumb Catcher” is all too apt. Skotchdopole sprinkles bits and pieces that add up to very little.

An aspirationally farcical home invasion thriller that never fully thrills, despite a game cast that does its darnedest to liven up an unfocused script that’s fashioned from genre odds and ends.

With a distinct POV, strong visual design, and the ability to see his strange slow-burn vision of semi-realistic domestic torture all the way through, Skotchdopole serves up a strong enough debut that he should someday get a shot at making another.

Chris Skotchdopole’s feature debut is a tantalizing mix of the absurd and the mundane.

A rambling and muddled attempt to approximate the result had Funny Games director Michael Haneke helmed a remake of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

[A] deceptively smart, occasionally muddled debut feature.

If Crumb Catcher, the feature debut from writer-director Chris Skotchdopole, never quite attains the cruel poeticism of Edward Albee’s masterpiece, it’s not for lack of being open to the occasion.

There's a nasty buzz to the plot and the performances that recalls old bad-vibes character studies like "The Last Seduction" and "The Honeymoon Killers, although this movie may never again be mentioned in the vicinity of those lower-depths classics.