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Phalanx Films isn’t a hugely known company; knowing this, it’s no surprise that a good deal of their 2005 film The Scoop looks as though it is filmed with a handheld camcorder, and that the sound quality can vary from whisper-quiet to echoing. But, as with many films that carry a sound storyline in spite of less than stellar production quality, all this can be ignored.

One part slacker-comedy, one part mystery, the story begins with an obviously injured man stumbling his way across a college campus, only to collapse and be shot moments later. Soon after, the scene changes to a prototypical college slacker, and the tale begins to unfold.

Jeff (Bryan Patrick Stoyle) is having a bad week. His senior year of college is not quite what he had expected, finding himself stuck sharing a room with a freshman obsessed with his girlfriend and inadvertently getting mixed up with a manipulative teenager intent on keeping him under her thumb. Add in a lost letter, overzealous frat pledges and an unscrupulous best friend, and it’s shaping up to be one of his worst.

Slacker comedy infused with a muddled mystery and the odd college-film cliché coupled with shades of Clerks­-esque humor, The Scoop is an amusing and intriguing movie definitely worth a look. Co-writer Andrew Wells takes a co-starring role as the oddly likable Todd, a serial-cheater married to a woman he despises with a penchant for tasteless jokes, the perfect foil to the more stalwart Jeff, who paints the picture of a good guy in a bad situation.

The only real problems in the film lay in the somewhat awkward editing – a front-seat conversation shot in differing levels of sound-quality is one particularly bad example – and occasional outright bad acting. While the hammy overdone rolls of some characters only contributes to the feel of the film, the particularly poor performance of Melissa Carr as Suzanne, an underage college sexpot, is distracting at best. Little things can easily distract from the storyline, such as a character who is presumably a smoker being somehow unable to properly hold a cigarette in her hand.

Overall? A great script troubled by mediocre filmmaking and campy effects, though it shines with potential. Writers Wells and Dan Kowalski  both show obvious talent, and actor Stoyle brings believable levity to his role. With a little more polish, these three could grow to bigger and better things in the future.