Category Archives: October

“Sleepless”, Review by Case Wright

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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.

“Rubes”, Film Review, By Case Wright

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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!

“East Hell”, Review by Case Wright

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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!

When a short is done well, it’s great!

ORIGIN, Film Review, by Case Wright

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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!

The Mayflower, Review By Case Wright

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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.

“Abe” Horror Short Review By Case Wright

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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.

Night of the Slasher, Review by Case Wright

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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!!!!

Jezebel, Review by Case Wright

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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!

“9 Minutes” (Dir. P.J. Wolff) Short-Film Review

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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!!!!

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Dracula Part 3, Review by Case Wright (The spoilers you deserve!)

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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.