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.
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!
Why do aliens always molest people in trailer parks/rural areas? Is it a slumming thing? I get that they’d wanna send the big guns to take over everything like a gigantic bomber, but the lure of the trailer park and its inhabitants aren’t really interesting to me and haven’t gotten into interstellar travel or even bent a wormhole. Also, if you’re an alien, why wait? I get it if you’re sending semi-autonomous drones like we do to Mars, but again our drones would be WAY more interested in a Martian city rather than fatty Martians drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon.
There’s the whole lost time thing. First, if you were to lose time because they’re going at the speed of light, you’d come back thousands of years later. Why would it be great for the aliens? By the time the Greys got back here, we humans would be 10000 years in the future and we’d all be dead or extremely advanced or maybe even beyond these particular aliens. In fact, their alien homeland might be extinct when they return home because of their fancy-pants super-luminal travel and nonchalant disregard of basic relativity. Go ahead and visit alien varmints, you’d come back and we’d have our own flyin’ saucers you little smug alien bitches! Teach you to probe us and bother people in the Berkshires!
This short on Dust answers the question: what happens when you get abducted and have your memory wiped. John, the quasi-protagonist, more like creepy hermit is building his very own personal trailer park. John always reachin for the stars with his feet on the ground! John has no one, but his trusty dog Jet who is much more interesting than John.
John sees a cloud in the sky that looks kinda weird and he takes a photo. Later that night, it’s aliens!!!! He does the floaty thing, but hits record on his phone. All could think was I really don’t wanna see this guy probed; my YouTube algorithms will never be the same.
He wakes up and his hands are burned and his phone shows a recording of 9 Minutes. It’s mostly him running around a lot. His dog, Jet, appears dead and they left John this……
Damn Weird Aliens! The dog comes back to life as a robo-dog?
The short had a couple of quick thrills and it’s fun to see the take on the alien abduction genre. Maybe, he’ll paint with acrylic? Please let it be so!!!!
Happy Horrorthon! Part 3!!! Drac is back…..ALRIGHT!!!! So, I decided to break this up and give Part 3 its very own post! Dracula needs to face his inner-self and see what makes him tick and fear. Dracula is in the 21st century in an underground secret lab because…why not?! It kept the story fresh and there’s nothing fresher than seeing a private industry emulate bloated government spending.
He’s not there as long as you’d think because Drac got lawyered up and he fed on Agatha’s descendent, BUT she has cancer and it is poisonous to Old Drac. This creates a good plot twist and has a great payoff at the story’s end. This episode tries to plug in the ideas from the book into this modern twist. However, it wasn’t flawless; the Renfield character never really worked for me because the actor kept playing it for comic relief and thought he was in a Benny Hill sketch. Nina played it well. She represented the Information Age: the veneer of sophistication, but really it is just narcissism with an iPhone.
Nina gets into Drac and claims to not fear age or death, but that’s easy to say when you’re young, hot, and everyone wants to get into your britches. Then, once she got turned into a vampire and was burned into a horrible crisp, she couldn’t get staked fast enough! Nina does do more than just become the world’s greatest Roomba achievement; Nina allows Drac to have a mental breakthrough.
Even though Nina was not really as intrepid about death as she claimed, her purported fearlessness attracted Drac for a reason and Agatha 2.0 was going to find out why! Drac is a Veteran. He wanted to die in battle with honor, but he wasn’t able to do so. His continued existence is his shame. Instead of dying in battle, he feared death, forcing him to live as a monster coward. Therefore, his final act of forgiving himself was to drink the poisoned blood of Agatha 2.0.
Her blood, her love, her life, gave Dracula what he needed- Death. Dracula gave Agatha what she needed: to touch the mystical and, by doing so, she touched the face of God. See, I told you it was a love story.
Happy Horrorthon! Dracula is saaaaaaailing, sailing takes me away to where I’ve always heard it could be and he’s eating every one the boaaaat. This episode was almost a bottle episode. Dracula REALLY wants to go to England. I love meat pies too; I can relate! Drac spends the episode eating …. EVERYONE!!! Dracula, Food does not equal love!
Mmmmm Talking Fudge!!!
I enjoyed the episode, but it was kinda rediculous. Dracula was eating everyone and NO ONE really suspected him until the end? Really? Nah, couldn’t be the weird Eastern European guy whose cabin smells like rotting flesh. Really, just look at the guy! No suspicions?!
Dramatization:
SEE WHAT I MEAN!!!!
There are some interesting people on board, but really I just felt like they were kind of a distraction from the much more Frost/Nixon style debate between Dracula and Agatha. Their dialogue was masterful. It pulled you in and it was SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY – Enlightenment Vs Reason! We’ll sell you the whole seat, but you’ll only need the EDGE!!!!
It turns out that Agatha is Dinner. When Agatha awakens, she and the remaining snacks manage to blow up the ship and Dracula is off the coast of England. He’s next to a hole, a hole, a hole at the bottom of the sea! When he wakes, he walks ashore and it’s MODERN DAY with helicopters! I didn’t see that coming, but why not? This was fun!
The Watcher in the Woods is one of those films that scares you, but you see it in your youth and it first introduces you horror. It’s like a horror movie kiddie pool. I watched this today with my daughters, which makes a really bad dad or a really awesome dad. Not sure.
My Daughter’s – Half Scary, Half weird.
I would agree with that assessment. There’s possession and I think aliens, but they don’t burst out of your chest.
The Curtis family moves into a Good Value house rental in England next door to Mrs. Aylwood (Bette Davis). Right away, poor Jan (Lynn-Holly Johnson) starts seeing weird things all around the property like laser beams. Yes, laser beams. After a lot of strange things, we learn that Mrs. Alywood’s daughter disappeared. The middle-aged townsfolk are somehow responsible….dun dun dun.
There are a lot of themes in this movie that revolve around mirrors and eclipses. For a Disney film, it is pretty scary!
I any case, the movie is free! Watch it and determine for yourself if this was a bad parenting call.
Happy Horrorthon!!! What do you get when you have Basques, Demons, Blacksmithing, and Illegitimate Children? About 91 minutes of entertainment! The toughest part of this movie is getting the title spelling correct. I couldn’t tell if they were speaking their Euskadi language or Spanish. I remember this dialect when I ran with the bulls in Pamplona. I was 22, hard-drinking, and up for anything dangerous. Once you left the city, it all looked liked rural Massachusetts and this film captured that old world culture and better yet, you have didn’t see me at 22 vomiting Paella, making out with Brits and Argentines, or ACCIDENTALLY ending up in a brothel.
The story centers around the reclusive Patxi who is considered a crazy hermit who lives outside of town and Usue, an orphaned child, who lives with the stigma of her mother’s suicide. Patxi was a veteran of the Napoleonic wars. When France invaded Spain, he fought, was captured and sentenced to death by firing squad. In order to see his family again, he made a deal with a demon Sarteal – as you do. Demons, they’re always acting like pun crazy evil genie’s, twisting your wishes to make them terrible.
I would be able to handle such a wish. I would draft a wish document with supporting case law, retain counsel for a minimum of 2 grand to review the wish, and insist the counsel indemnify. Sadly, Paxti did not have my savvy. After he made the wish, he survived and went home to find that his wife thought he was dead, had a baby – Usue- with a lover, and in a rage Paxti killed the lover and the mom hanged herself. In response, Paxti blames Sarteal for his wife’s death, captures Sarteal, and imprisons him in his bunker outside of town. Poor Usue is left parentless because of Paxti.
Side Note: Screw Paxti. Yes, Sarteal’s evil and blah blah blah, but it was Paxti who did the murdering. Take some personal responsibility, Paxti! It’s like that song “Hey Joe” by Jimi Hendrix. Joe is an asshat, but the Narrator is just as guilty. In Errementary, there’s no one else to blame! Unlike this story, Joe confessed that he was “gonna shoot [his] Old Lady and the narrator doesn’t do ANYTHING!!!” Why not say… Heeeey Joe, Where you going with that gun in your hand? Heeeey Joe, Maybe we should have a chat..take a breather…maybe up the meds a bit?Heeeeey Joe, you don’t down own your Old Lady and domestic violence is never acceptable!Heeeey Police, Joe’s got a damn gun and is threatening to murder his wife… yes… right now… he’s heading to.. where is that house honey? …. 72..yeah….7213 Robins Lane. Thank you.
The local kids are constantly taunting Usue and chasing her and, on one occasion, she’s fleeing bullies and goes where they will NOT follow- Paxti’s property. His home and property is riddled with traps, Christian crosses, and other warding. There appears to be a child in a cage that she sets free, but this in fact Sarteal- the demon. Sarteal attacks Paxti, but Paxti gets him back, and then Paxti bonds with Usue by torturing the demon with chickpeas. Yes, Chickpeas. Demons are all OCD if you throw chickpeas on the ground, they have to count them. It comes up repeatedly in the story. It’s a whole thing.
Sarteal is kind of funny actually. He’s a failed soul collector and has been in Paxti’s makeshift prison for at least 20 years. In town, a Tax Collector comes and convinces the townsfolk to enter Paxti’s property because there is supposedly gold there. The Tax Collector, however, is not who he seems (except to Libertarians!)- he’s a demon -Alastor – sent to collect both the Blacksmith’s soul as well as Sarteal who is in poor standing in Hell for being a screw up.
The townsfolk try to enter Paxti’s property, but get caught in Paxti’s many traps he set up to imprison Sarteal if he escaped. The Tax Collector convinces the townsfolk to believe that Paxti is holding or killed Usue on his property. They form a mob with torches…very 3rd Act Frankenstein. Usue wants to see her mom again; therefore, she makes a deal with Alastor to see her mom in Hell in exchange for her soul. Alastor takes her to Hell and Paxti’s sets out to rescue her. He goes to Hell with a Golden Bell because the chimes do things to demons….it’s weird.
The depiction of Hell on their budget was not bad. Paxti does manage to redeem himself. He sends Usue back to Earth and he stays in hell with his bell and to find Usue’s mom…it’s weird. I enjoyed this film A LOT, but mostly because of the live tweeting. So, my advice is to try to watch it in some way with friends!
Through the Shattered Lens 