AllMovie

Multi-talented writer, producer, director, and actor Monty Lapica took Hollywood by storm in the mid-2000s, not long after graduating from film school. In 2005 and 2006, Lapica's cinematic debut, Self-Medicated (with the wunderkind credited in all of the said capacities), swept through the festival circuit and netted a host of awards for the young man -- then in his early twenties. The film à clef starred Lapica as Andrew Eriksen, a malevolent young junkie who gets shuttled off to a third-world employee-recruitment camp masquerading as a shady rehab center, and then sets about engineering his own escape. Produced in 2005, the film (which co-starred Diane Venora and Greg Germann) took at least two years to secure a stateside theatrical issue; it premiered nationally in the late summer of 2007.