Just plain BAD
If every shot of the movie would have lasted half, or maybe a third of what it did... we would still have a tedious, absurd and flat short film, but at least the pain would have been shorter.
A lot of emphasis has been focused on how hard it was to find a young aussie actor who could surf and that wouldn't be afraid of the gay sex scenes. For god's sake! There's almost no surf at all in the picture, and almost none performed by the main character. They could have used any of the three freaky ladies that appear in the film to stunt those scenes, as they were so bad filmed and the surf in them so poor, nobody would have noticed... or cared.
It would have been more interesting to hire an actor who couldn’t surf “that” well, better than a bad surfer that couldn’t even pretend to be an actor. Maybe they just picked him to be in line with the average acting of the film, which is hideous. ALL but the mother of Cass (quite believable and moving in her little scene) are very very very BAD actors.
With good actors the film would have been more enjoyable, but still bad. If a least they would have hired hot dumb hunks, desperately waiting until the end would have been a more enjoyable task.
I agree with other posters in that the things that make this film a little different (the kinky job the boy has, the scenes with de Pope and saint arguing...) aren't just enough. It gives the film a little personality but not a particularly interesting one.
And just one BIG advice to filmmakers that believe themselves to be transcendental auteurs shooting a film that will make a difference. You can write, produce, star, score or even cater your own film... but please, never EDIT it yourself. This film is a textbook example of how the filmmaker believes every shot he’s done is just amazing and can’t get enough of it, making them LONG, even endless, when the bad news is that no one in the world believes the same thing. We all just find them boring and want them to end quicker. When hiring a professional editor, he may not be able to produce a good film from this material, but he would have helped a ton with the rhythm, the film’s obvious biggest problem together with the acting and noninteresting and underdeveloped story.