5 Movies That Broke Laws To Get Made

4) Escape From Tomorrow

Disneyland strictly prohibit filmmaking within their theme parks, but that didn’t stop director Randy Moore. Driven by an odd desire to portray America’s beloved attraction as a haunting, nightmarish location of evil, Moore snuck his camera crew into the Disney theme parks in small groups to get past security – all equipped with season passes and hidden under tourist attire.

If Disney had clocked on to what Moore had been doing around the theme parks in 2012, there’s little doubt they would have ripped the cameras from his crew and stomped on them there and then. Indeed, the filmmaker’s re-imagined look at Disneyland doesn’t cast the company in such a good light – instead showing Mickey Mouse & Co to be pure evil beneath their sweet, smiling surface.

Filmed on a shoestring budget of around half a million bucks, Escape From Tomorrow looks painfully shoddy in parts. Some scenes employ a green screen so crude and blatant that the film occasionally looks like it was made by high school students messing about with home video equipment. But ultimately, this only adds to the movie’s leering creepiness, nicely accompanying the eerie black-and-white filter that the whole film is dipped in.

Escape From Tomorrow received a mixed critical reception, and whilst it can be seen as a disordered mishmash of half-baked ideas, it is in several ways also some kind of a masterpiece.  In a genre all by itself as a Guerrilla-Surrealist picture, yet dauntingly close to contemporary culture in the real world through its inside-look at Disney, Randy Moore’s movie ought to stand the test of time in cult underground film circles, and may even claw its way up to finding more followers in the future.