Everyone wants to be in the record books. John Penney’s Zyzzyx Road is in them for the lowest-grossing film in U.S. history.

How low? We’re talking thirty dollars.

If we’re being honest and subtracting the ten bucks that producer/star Leo Grillo refunded to the film’s own makeup artist, the actual theatrical run of this movie netted a crisp twenty-dollar bill. That’s not a box office return; that’s lunch at a diner.

But behind the trivia is a sun-baked noir that feels like it was cursed from the jump. Shot in 18 days in the Mojave Desert, the production was a gauntlet. You’ve got Tom Sizemore, acting his heart out while being arrested mid-production for failing drug tests. You’ve got Katherine Heigl, right as Grey’s Anatomy was making her a household name, stuck in the sand with a shovel. And you’ve got Leo Grillo as Grant, an accountant who makes the classic mistake of thinking a Vegas tryst with a girl named Marissa won’t end with a dead body in his trunk.

The plot is pure desert-noir fever dream: Grant and Marissa (Heigl) kill her jealous ex, Joey (Sizemore), or at least they think they do. They head out to Zyzzyx Road to bury the evidence, but the trunk ends up empty, and the desert starts playing tricks on Grant’s head. Is Joey a ghost? Is Marissa a succubus? Is the heat just melting Grant’s brain?

Zyzzyx Road isn’t actually the bottom-of-the-barrel trash its reputation suggests. It’s a gritty, sweaty little thriller that suffered from a bizarre distribution loophole. Because of the Screen Actors Guild rules for low-budget films, the producers had to give it a domestic theatrical run before they could sell it overseas. So, they rented one screen in Dallas, Texas, for a week, played it once a day at noon and hoped nobody would show up.

Mission accomplished.

Sizemore is predictably great as the menacing Joey. He always excelled at playing guys you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley or an abandoned mine. Heigl does the femme fatale-in-over-her-head bit well enough, and the Mojave scenery provides enough natural production value to keep things from looking too cheap.

It’s a movie that exists in the shadow of its own zero-dollar mythos, but if you look past the $30 price tag, it’s a solid piece of independent filmmaking that captures the feeling of a bad weekend in Vegas that just won’t end.

You can get this from MVD.