Writer/director Steve Balderson's Watch Out (Breaking Glass Pictures) is that rare social satire where the artist is so determined to push the envelope of acceptable taste that he takes his oh-so-special vision right over a cliff. The film begins innocently enough with a somewhat trenchant spoof of early John Waters: a socially backward young man, Jonathan Barrows (Matt Riddlehoover), is seen being led by a dog collar by his parents to a neighbor's house, where the parents demand that he be allowed to "date" their daughter. The explicit erotic action that follows can be laughed off as sort of Waters 2.0, an up-to-date X-rated version of the "filthiest family in the world."

Having broken their boy in, the parental units disappear, and Jonathan is unleashed on an unsuspecting universe. The young man travels to a Michigan private college, where he claims to have a job interview. The device of having the protagonist give a running internal monologue, in which he bares his morbid hatred of every living human creature on the train, begins to pall after 45 minutes. Jonathan is witty in a showoff sort of way, it feels like he's swallowed a thesaurus with a Krafft-Ebing chaser. Yes, it's obviously satire, but it's such a toxic mix of pompous attitude and minimal plot that one realizes its creator has painted himself into a corner from which neither he nor his viewers emerge unscarred.

Watch Out suffers from the episodic, disjointed feel of an especially digressive performance piece. A couple of bits do manage to soar: Jonathan is confronted in a bar by a brazen, heavyset woman who matches his preening, misanthropic self-esteem; the dark comedy of his phone chat with a bitchy male desk-clerk. Ultimately, our hero turns into that most predictable of sociopaths, the serial killer with a messiah complex. Here the movie quickly morphs into a bad imitation of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, spinning madly out of control, going from saucy hip to truly disgusting.

Recently the critic David Edelstein explained how one of the lowest points of his career occurred when after enduring the original Austrian version of iconoclast Michael Haneke's psychological torture porn epic, Funny Games, he had the satisfaction of breaking the DVD over his knee. While Watch Out deserves a knee, my advice is simply to skip it. I recommend the DVD of David Jacobson's underrated 2002 Dahmer, starring The Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner. Special features include audio commentary, theatrical trailer and photo gallery.