What happens if you’ve moved on, but your ex hasn’t? Ok, I won’t lie- This short scared me. Really. Usually, these films are from the women’s perspective, BUT as someone who dated his share of psychos, this one got to me. No one believes you until you play them the threatening voicemails or point out the ex who is out standing outside.
At it’s heart, Sleepless is love turned inward. The ultimate closure for the ex is the ultimate ending for her once true love. So, Earth, Wind, and Fire- After the love is gone- she’s going to kill you!
One of the amazing things about this short is that EVERYONE involved got a well-deserved great career. The directing and writing pulled me in. I was legit thrilled and scared. Peter Huang (director), Aaron Abrams (male lead), Anna Hopkins (female lead), Jenny Raven (female lead) all went on to bright careers. A lot of the shorts are sad that way- you see hidden gems who remain hidden.
The film is 6 minutes and change; so, think about that- the writer/director and actors gave me more thrills and fear in 6 minutes than a feature length has in 120 minutes. This is truly excellent acting and filmmaking.
What if OK GO went psycho? This short explores that premise. The protagonists Milton and Paul are much like OK GO, talented, yet a tiny bit pompous. Although OK GO hasn’t murdered anyone…yet, I’m sure that if they did start a life of murderin’ that they would murder like this.
Milton and Paul have just been laid before getting tenure. This fact made me like them less because I despise professors. I’m sure that some are not lazy, sanctimonious, garbage-people, but they must be in hiding or retired because even this week, one of my professors just didn’t show up for class- Just didn’t feel like it. I assuming his thoughts were as follows: Too bad, so sad lowly students – I’m going to roll around in my unearned money now like the thief that I am…. or something like that.
Try getting these holier than thou gasbags held to account and it will take you a year to get your money back and this wasn’t a For Profit school either- NO NO NO…These were public schools; so, take that taxpayer. In my case, it was Uncle Sam’s money that I demanded back because a calculus professor didn’t show up for the entire quarter for either of his classes; yet, he still expected to be and WAS paid. For me, hearing that two professors got fired in this film, made me wonder if I was watching fantasy and if a dragon would appear any minute. I swore heavily in an earlier draft, but I held back for you.
These two professors were fired and decided to kidnap those whom fired them and kill them using Rube Goldberg machines. My main critique is not the jokes or writing- those were fine; overall, the short was entertaining. No, my problem was that they didn’t spend enough time making the Rube Goldberg machine complex enough. Try harder, but then again, perhaps that lent some realism to the film because there is nothing lazier or worse than a college professor. We could put them on the same Herpes-Infected-Horny-Racoon-Island (HIHRI) where I’d like to put all of the sanctimonious politicians. Now, that is a platform we can all get behind!
Finally, I get to watch a good short. I will not lead you astray. This short is worth your time. I promise. It goes for comedy and achieves it. A short is successful if you care about the story and characters and get an emotional response in a brief period of time. Really, that is a tremendous achievement. It has a mean girl (well, mean girl demon), two aspiring devil worshippers, and a neglected boy who needs a sitter.
The two girls summon a demon and she appears and it’s awesome!!! The girls are all goth and the Demon is too cool for school-Brooklyn-hipster-badass.
The demon starts savaging them, “You’d be really pretty if it weren’t for your clothes and face and house”. This is fun because demons are usually scary, slick, or sexy, but that’s usually only the purview of male demons. It was fun dark girl power. I felt like I was back in the City and it’s nice to know that these people still exist in my absence.
After the demon is summoned, she’s takes a liking to the real underdog and the story becomes a quasi-revenge story. I really to hope to see Lauren Cipoletti (The Demon) more. She has great comic timing and we need more of her!
I have a love/hate relationship with short films because there isn’t a middle ground. Film school is starting to look like a place to go to get in from the rain. When they’re done well, it’s so moving and amazing because in this short period of time, I cared about these characters and was sad to see them fail or overjoyed to see them win. What a lot of filmmakers fail to understand about the short is how challenging they are and really it should inform them that maybe they should try something else. Painting? Sculpting? Insurance? Mail Carrier? Many terrible short-filmmakers will evolve into terrible feature-length story tellers. They have to be stopped!
The short film becomes the proving ground for their bad habits: trading a shocking shot for narrative, trading grittiness for character likeability, trading story structure for a lazy jumbled mess masquerading as realism.
ORIGIN is the worst short that I’ve ever seen. It’s good in that it shows what NOT to do. The story is derivative and boring. The characters are unlikeable, which might trick a teacher into saying great realism, but in reality – banal unlikeable characters lower your stakes and destroy your final act. The dialogue is predictable. The emotion is stilted and unbelievable. Sadly, it was thirteen minutes too long (runtime 13 minutes).
ORIGIN depicts a banal and horrible family dealing with their son being attacked and slowly transforming into a monster. The son doesn’t speak and we learn nothing about him; so, I didn’t care when he died. The father was gross, boring, and annoying; so, I didn’t care when he had to put his monster son down. The mom was a boring/cheating whiner. Her dull and uncaring boyfriend was just sort of there sometimes like a mailbox. The mom and her boyfriend added nothing and slowed an already terrible story down.
What was really insulting was the hamfisted violins at the end that were way too loud to let me know- this is where you should feel……sad. Well, I didn’t and no one should. Don’t tell me how to feel. You have to earn concern. You have to earn stakes. Just having a bunch of unlikeable people running around is boring. We need a show on TLC called filmmaker intervention! This person must be stopped!
What if in Alien the xenomorph was really easy to kill? This is a question most filmmakers never cared to answer, but you would not be fancy then like Benjamin Farry! Nope, you would not be fancy, not….fancy…at…all! Benjamin Farry, unlike you, is super fancy because he answered that question- that’s just science! Like that song, She blinded ME… with Bacon Grease… or science or something like that. Bacon is scientifically delicious! I’m very hungry.
Speaking of being hungry, what if you were a space ship janitor and got infected by a parasite that made you hallucinate and go full-on cannibal and head toward earth? Well, you’d rapidly remember that you were a space janitor and blow up your space ship before humanity became a snack! That’s pretty much the entire short.
I don’t want to be too cruel about this short because it did have a beginning, middle, and end like you would have in an interesting story. I cannot write that this wasn’t filmed because it definitely was filmed…and I think they used props… From party city. I also cannot write that it wasn’t a short because it was really really easy for the protagonist to achieve his quest; therefore, it was a short or even a brief. I cannot write that “The Mayflower” didn’t win an award because that did happen….somehow. Maybe it was like everyone got a turn to win like an honorary degree?
If you’re bored and want to take that boredom to another level, this is the short for you! Think of it like watching Alien if it were on cheat mode and made for 30 bucks.
“The Deal” works on two levels: Art and Reality. The story is about selling your soul. What the Adversary is really offering is a do-over with life on cheat mode. This story was directed by Daniel Kaminsky and written by Will Strouse, but Will only got credit on IMDB, not in the film credits. Why is it that only the director’s career took off and Will Strouse was erased? What did the Director do in Hollywood before this break? He’d never really directed or written anything, but now he’s the Executive Producer of The Nevers on HBO. How did he get such luck? For the better part of a decade, Daniel Kaminsky was the assistant to Joss Whedon. In fact, he was his assistant for all the Marvel movies and tv and this was while Joss was purportedly up to his worst behavior. Daniel Kaminsky did not intend for this, but the short rings like a confessional for his own Faustian deal. This short was the first payday for Daniel’s deal because Joss was the executive producer.
To be fair, I’ve argued before that many many many of our greatest artists were terrible human beings- EG Picasso. Both Joss and Picasso, were notorious misogynists, but brilliant. I loved Buffy and pretty much everything Joss did, except Dollhouse which was terrible. It could be that artists need more of a community of regular people to be better behaved? Perhaps Hollywood doesn’t provide the limits that some creatives need to keep from falling into the abyss. We could do a housing program where we re-settle artists to Peoria, Des Moines, and Pittsburgh; not to be mean, just to keep them a little more grounded.
Back to selling your soul, unlike Picasso, Joss took an apprentice who likely saw him at his worst and knew how to keep the secrets. Dramatization below:
Joss hires Daniel
The Deal shows a former Prom King and Queen, Bryce and Monica, who have fallen into a post-high school slump. They are going to a party being held by the former nerd James; he used to do magic, his sister Becca used to be obese, but both are now rich and thin. In fact, everyone at the party has obvious success despite their purported mediocrity, which we learn from the exposition nuggets. One exposition nugget was from Hector, who was Bryce’s high school friend and got Bryce’s scholarship when Bryce suffered a car accident.
The party continues and we learn that Monica really wanted to be an actress and then we lose track of her. Bryce can’t track her down either. He enters James’ room and she’s not there and Bryce starts to lose it and search everywhere for Monica. Finally, James’ reveals his black demon-eyes and we learn that everyone there made a deal. In fact, Monica was about to make a deal, using her body as a trade. This was a very Harvey Weinstein moment. Bryce accidentally kills Monica and James made her disappear from existence. No one remembers her. In the end, Bryce doesn’t either.
Monica’s disappearance also fits with what Weinstein and Whedon did to people who crossed them!
When you do something terrible, the greatest deal would be to have it erased from all time. But like any deal with the Devil, there’s collateral damage: Bryce’s injury so Hector could succeed or Monica because Bryce chose himself.
This story rings so real because it was just six months after this short was released that all of the Kingpins started to fall: Weinstein, Lauer, Rose, CK, and eventually Joss himself. Maybe some deals have fine print? This short is creepy, but not for the writing or directing.
Man sought to create robots in his image; unfortunately, he succeeded.
Abe is a self-aware robot/serial killer. Yes, we’re being replaced in the factories and now the degenerate psychos will never be able to keep up. Abe spends his time with his captive and explains to her why he is going to torture her to death. He explains that he was programmed to love, but the family who adopted him feared him and so he tortured and murdered them. Now, he stalks pretty brunettes to kill and makes them listen to his creepy excuses before he kills them.
This was very very creepy and ALTER is really excellent at promoting the short as a great vehicle for a horror story. This story taps into something deeper than just an evil robot; that’s really a sub-genre. No, the robot is who we are. He’s a construct to take away the excuses and rationalizations for committing evil. This inhuman form with an inhuman voice lays bare the real reason people commit horrible acts- they enjoy it. It is completely clear that is the point when we see him stalking his next victim. He’s excited and thrilled because evil enjoys being evil.
Abe is so human that he has managed to convince himself of his lies. I always wondered if pathological liars ever started to believe their own press? He blames every one else for his murders and cruelty because if he admitted honestly that it was his fault; then, he’d have to admit that he did it for enjoyment. I think he knows his rhetoric is as rehearsed and false as every other predator’s excuses. Unfortunately for us, this story seems more and more inevitable.
It’s so nice when a short gets it right!!! Also, I LOVE a good horror comedy! Night of the Slasher inverts all of the horror tropes. Jenelle is left home alone and she listens to 80s metal, engages in pre-marital sex, drinks and does drugs to attract the killer who slashed her the year before. This is so fun and so quick. Janelle lures a co-worker to her home named “The Bait” … really. It’s that awesome!
He brings some beers and she rapidly drinks all of them, giving the greatest dead pan line:
I have some friends in AA you could talk to. It’s funnier when you see it and you SHOULD!!!!
The short is an amazingly challenging artform. Often, writers will abuse the short by turning it into a pitch for a longer film or worse they have no resolution at all. Sometimes it’s just plain boring. Jezebel was boring. I was checking the runtime 3 minutes into it. I think it’s a nine-minute runtime. I was bored for…. nine of them. Leave it to a pretentious writer to make sex boring. I didn’t know that was a thing, but here we are.
Jezebel is about a Victorian era stilted talking depressive vampire who REALLY like to philosophize between “Johns”/Snacks. She eats her customers, even a clingy one who she seemed to love after knowing him for only 2 minutes. I understand that a short needs to be compact, but it shouldn’t be terrible. Jezebel appears to have won a number of awards, which I’m assuming were given out of gratitude that it ended.
If you want to re-create the verbiage of your thirteen year old goth friend, this short is for you!
Hey my readers!!!! It is time for another horror review. I probably should be studying Differential Equations or determining the velocity of CO2 molecules on Venus…Really, I did that today- They move at .649 m/s. If you’re ever on Venus and wonder, Man this CO2 is really a mindbender…I wonder how fast the molecules are movin’? SPOILER ALERT- It’s .649 m/s. If I had a dollar for everytime that I needed to know how fast the air on Venus is blowin’ around- I’d have…I’d have exactly one dollar.
The WNUF Halloween Special is the best home movie ever made. The entire budget was $1500.00. Yep, that was it. I’m not going to judge this film too harshly. Did it have flaws? Sure, but 1500 bucks?! It was clear to me that the people who put their hearts and souls into making this treated it like a million dollar budget.
WNUF Halloween Special has 1980s ads that are so on point; it’s all but impossible to tell them from the real thing. Honestly, I would bet dollars to donuts that the Duffer Brothers saw this film and were more than inspired by it.
The movie is presented as a live broadcast of a local news station on Halloween. The commercials were absolutely accurate. I remember being a little kid and seeing these ads and remember dressing up for Halloween and my Gen X babysitters with their big hair and crazy makeup.
The newscast focuses on a Haunted House and the B-story of a group of right-wing religious fanatics. The movie came out just a bit before the Conjuring. This nostalgia drips a bit every 20 years or so. The movie does a good job of delivering a couple of scares. More importantly, it has a heart of determination to put out a movie. This movie was loved. If you have a Shudder subscription, it’s a must watch!
Through the Shattered Lens 