After a title card that says Kevin is "communiting" to work—Underdoges is entirely devoid of more natural scene transitions, like a person walking down the street or getting on a train or whatever—Kevin arrives at his job: standing in a park and holding an anti-IRS sign for his boss, a tax lawyer. Kevin and his boss get into a shouting match, and Kevin quits. In what quickly becomes a pattern for Underdoges, this boss is never seen or mentioned again—presumably because Underdoges couldn’t find a consistent stable of actors who would commit to a role for the duration of the shoot.

Soon after, Underdoges introduces its villain, Bobby Vandenberg, who is paying off an abortion doctor in a public park. "One, two, three, four… ten abortions today? Not bad. But business is slower than usual," Vandenberg frets. "Abortions being illegal past 20 weeks is going to kill business. I can’t believe those stupid conservatives and liberals passed a law because it’s scientifically logical. Good thing I bribed enough governors to veto it down."

In a movie full of bizarre and outlandish characters, Bobby Vandenberg is the worst of them all—a straw-man so cartoonishly evil that you’ll long for the depth and poignancy you’d find in your average Scooby-Doo villain. Many of Vandenberg’s screechy speeches devolve into misogynistic rants about women; at one point, he physically attacks a female colleague. In a later scene, he explains why he’s such a psychotic asshole in a single breathless rush: "God didn’t save my mom and dad from the car crash. And conservatives abandoned me to the church nobody donated to. Liberals stole my food stamps. And all you stupid women who play all these dating mind games."

Later on, Kevin becomes a successful Bitcoin miner, netting $20,000 per week and patching things up with his girlfriend Sarah. Vandenberg gets arrested, Kevin parties with the DEA agents who helped him, and celebrates his triumph by delivering a long, terrible, self-penned poem about the difference between being a winner and being a loser. (Everyone applauds at the end anyway, because if it’s your movie, you can make the other actors do whatever you want.)

But attempting to follow the plot of Underdoges is basically missing the point, because the screenplay is really just a Trojan horse for the mini-rants Junson Chan wants to deliver. Sometimes these rants are political, attacking the pro-choice movement or undocumented immigrants. More often, they’re stepped in various pop-cultural touchstones, making ham-handed references to Star Wars, The Dark Knight, and Pulp Fiction. And more than anything, there are a shit-ton of scenes about gamer culture, with long, pointless digressions devoted to subjects like online trolling and rage-quitting. "I just found out that booth babes are banned at all my favorite video gaming conventions," says Kevin in one of many gaming-related non-sequiturs. "Hot women were a favorite staple of my video gaming experience since I was a little kid, and other gamers feel that way too. And now it’s all going away."

Even if the script were brilliant, or the acting were Oscar-caliber, the sheer technical ineptitude of Underdoges makes it basically unwatchable. The dialogue in one outdoor scene is totally drowned out by the drone of a plane flying overhead; for whatever reason, no one involved had enough time or interest in the scene to reshoot it. And one recurring character—a brutally unfunny caricature of a burnout hippie, who delivers incomprehensible rants about Mommy Nature and her fish children—shouts his lines at such an uncomfortably loud pitch that I was worried Underdoges might blow out my speakers. ("I think George Lucas was right. The technical aspects of filmmaking are easy," says Chan in a blog post about the movie—a sentiment so obviously undercut by his own film that I briefly wondered if Underdoges was just an elaborate troll.)

Attempting to follow the plot of Underdoges is missing the point. The screenplay is just a Trojan horse for the mini-rants Junson Chan wants to deliver.

The best-case scenario for this movie is probably the kind of ironic grassroots support that eventually greeted Tommy Wiseau or Neil Breen. I suspect Underdoges is ultimately too dull, inept, and alienating to acquire the so-bad-it’s-good cult that keeps movies like this alive. But the qualities that make Underdoges such a bad movie also make it a fascinating test case for the lengths that viewers will go to support a movie that affirms their political beliefs. Chan complains his movie was banned "by Hollywood movie Theaters, and film festivals" because it centers on "pro-life characters that deal with illegal immigration." The reality, of course, is that no movie this incompetent—of any political persuasion—ever stood any chance at a major release.