The Worst Best Man (2013)

Director: Kenny Colt
Stars: Cody Loepke, Peter Lane, Jason Halverson and Lolita Gongora

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 submissions.

This film was an official selection at the Filmstock Arizona 2013 round of the revolving Filmstock film festival. Here's an index to my reviews of all selections.

Colt Classic Pictures is another local production company I've seen before, though I haven't got round to reviewing Last Call yet. They're immediately memorable to me because of their studio ident, which ruthlessly spits in the eye of my OCD. Yes, that's petty of me, but we are who we are. 'Hi, I'm Hal and I'm a kerning Nazi.' I enjoyed this more than that last Colt Classic film, because it's a neat run through a worst possible scenario that has good humour and better timing. It's not a perfect film, but it's built well on a solid framework and it doesn't do anything wrong. It's competent, period, and especially enjoyable when you factor in that it was shot for a 48 hour film challenge. Worst possible scenarios have been explored before and they'll be explored again, even within this challenge where Inflated covered some of the same ground in a different way. I preferred that as a film but this as a nightmare for its characters. Writers Cody Loepke, Mike Churchill and Kenny Colt have agreeably devious minds.

What would you see as the moment everything seemed most horribly wrong? Well, Kevin is about to get married. No, don't sigh in sympathy yet. He's about to get married in four hours and he's picking up his best man and future brother-in-law, Mickey, who is stuck outside the house of last night's one night stand. He's in his underwear, because she left for work but her boyfriend came home. Mickey's pants are still inside and Kevin's wedding rings are still in their pocket. That's a pretty solid start to a comedy short and the plot unfolds capably from there. It's no great task to visualise how that's going to happen but it's handled well. A couple of the jokes are cheap and obvious but most play out very nicely indeed. There's even great use of both the competition's required prop and line of dialogue, a candle providing the film's prize for best use of prop. It's certainly one of the few competition films deserving of a search on YouTube or Vimeo in a couple of months. You'll enjoy it.