Garden Party, written and directed by Jason Freeland, is a movie that makes you wish you could punch a movie in the face. With its Altmanesque pretensions, you can imagine it being pitched as "an exploration of the gritty underbelly of Los Angeles through the intersecting lives of impressionable twentysomethings." This is plainly its intention. Its tag line is "Come with a dream. Leave with a story." It is not necessary to debate whether this drained intention could have yielded anything decent, because this movie has bigger problems. It is bad to the last shot. The last shot is of the Hollywood sign.

There are various stone-faced plots. (What I wouldn't have given for the slightest injection of humor. A little walk-on for Johnny Drama?) These plots involve characters with names like Sally St. Claire and Todd Winger and they revolve around the separate lives of an aspiring musician, a handful of nubile girls, and a beady-eyed nudie photographer. There is cheesy saxophone music. Garden Party, you realize halfway through, is porn with no sex.

As a rule, the female actors are decent and the male actors are embarrassing. (Vinessa Shaw, the blonde playing Sally St. Claire, is, however, an exception.) Willa Holland (who plays Kaitlin Cooper on The O.C. and is soon to appear in a Michael Winterbottom film and another movie alongside Susan Sarandon, according to her bio) is evidently a fine actor. This movie will mysteriously disappear from her credits any time now.