Night of Something Strange (2016)

Director: Jonathan Straiton
Writer: Jonathan Straiton from a story by Jonathan Straiton and Ron Bonk
Stars: Rebecca C Kasek, Trey Harrison, Wayne W Johnson, Toni Ann Gambale, Michael Merchant, John Walsh, Tarrence Taylor, Nicola Fiore and Brinke Stevens

This film was an official selection at the 11th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2016 films.

It wasn’t surprising when Night of Something Strange won Best Horror Feature at the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival because it was the one that had the buzz. The Cruel Tale of the Medicine Man was different and enjoyable but everyone was talking about this one instead, whether because they loved it, they hated it or they just couldn’t believe what they had just seen. I talked to quite a few people in each of those categories, but along with The Greasy Strangler, which wasn’t in competition, it was the film on everyone’s lips this year and it won’t take much to explain why. In fact, I can just explain some of Wayne W Johnson’s role as Cornelius and you’ll get the picture. He’s not the star of the movie, though he is the first person we see and he continues to show up throughout. He’s just the actor who gets to do the most outrageous things, even without a heck of a lot of screen time. I can’t think of another part in any movie that does as much, even if we don’t correlate to time on screen. If we do that, he’s in a league of his own.

Let’s start at the beginning. This film kicks off with a necrophiliac rape and only digs a deeper hole from there. Yes, that’s Cornelius in the morgue getting his rocks off with a Jane Doe. He should have read the card, because this unknown naked chick died of a virulent STD and, next thing we know, he’s back in his trailer with burning junk, raping his wife. She knocks him out with a heavy phone then sticks him with a kitchen knife, but he rips out her uterus and eats it. At least, I think it’s her uterus. It’s possibly a foetus and I wouldn’t put it past writer/director Jonathan Straiton. By sheer coincidence, he and actor Michael Merchant were sat immediately in front of me and it was fascinating watching them watch the audience and laughing at their disbelieving faces. Let me highlight that we’re about five minutes in at this point and we’ve had two rapes, one of them of a corpse, and an ingestion of the female reproductive system. This film clearly isn’t going to hold back and it’s really only just getting started.

Now, some people told me that it was a disturbing film and I don’t buy that at all; this is a comedy more than it is a horror film, though it’s very much both. Other people told me that it was offensive and I don’t buy that either; it could have offended a lot more people by simply mentioning politics or religion and it steers clear of both. It’s really an icky film, a professionally icky film that does the sort of things that we usually only see in Troma pictures but with real actors and higher production values than Lloyd Kaufman is comfortable with. That doesn’t mean that this cost a lot, because Straiton told me how much he spent on it and it’s certainly not what you might think; it’s just that all the money is up there on the screen. He claims to have been influenced by eighties horror movies, especially slashers and zombie flicks and that makes a lot of sense. I saw it as Brain Dead meets The Taint with live action hentai and the odd nod here and there to classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. So not disturbing, not offensive but very icky.

While Cornelius reappears at points to do something else utterly outrageous, as if he’s determined to be a drinking game, the movie couldn’t sustain its impact if that was everything that happened. So, we shift back to school and meet a host of characters who will soon leave for Spring Break and end up running in to Cornelius and/or his zombie STD creations. If we hadn’t realised Straiton’s influences already, we can’t miss them in the names of the five kids who head out to the beach together. There’s Carrie and her dorky cousin Jason. There’s her boyfriend Freddy and her friend Christine. The only one not named for an iconic horror movie character is the token black guy, Brooklyn. Skipping out of class early to leave before them is Pam, whose boyfriend Dirk shows up in a black muscle car blasting Mean Motherfucker Blues by Angry Johnny & The Killbillies. No, this movie isn’t interested in being subtle but thanks for the heads up about that band, folks. How have I never heard of these guys before?

I throw all those names in quickly because that’s how the movie does it. While it generally nails its goals, there are flaws and the rapid fire introduction of characters is one. I couldn’t keep up at this point, so had to figure out names and relationships as the film ran on, and it took until the Q&A to figure out Cornelius raped his wife rather than his mother. Another problem is that the cast here are generally young so a few had to put on make up to look aged. The clerk we’re about to meet at the gas station in Goldvein, VA is a great example, as she looks like she’s young but made up to look thirty years older, yellow and wizened to boot, because she chain smokes. She’s a minor character so it’s no real spoiler to highlight how funny her death scene is, with her avoiding a zombie mailman who aims to rape her to death by crawling slowly away while still puffing away like a true addict. This also highlights how much this is a comedy as much as it is a horror movie. I missed what may have been her best line because people were laughing so hard.

Everyone ends up at the Redwood Budget Motel and, well, here’s where I’d usually say that you can write the script yourself but… I have to be a little careful this time out. No, there’s no attempt made to twist the tried and tested formulae of zombie flicks and slasher movies into something clever and original. We get what we expect to get on that level: good looking teens with their little relationship dramas aiming to get laid when the apocalypse hits and kills them one by one. However, Straiton ratchets up the ick factor with the delight of a pixie. While he succeeded in making the sort of picture that he wanted to both make and watch, I honestly believe that his true joy is in sitting back at a festival and enjoying how much it grosses people out. And to say that it grosses people out is an understatement, though I do wonder how many of today’s kids will be freaked out more by the brief appearance of a clown than anything else. Highlighting that this could be called Freddy vs Jason is guaranteed to make anyone who’s seen the film cringe.

And, as much as this is an homage to the eighties, just as its companion piece, She Kills, is an homage to the seventies (Straiton would like to see them exhibited as a double bill), this is a product of today. Things didn’t get this outrageous in the eighties because this would have been seen as too much. I grew up as a horror fan in England, where we suffered from the censorship inherent in the video nasty era, but none of the VHS tapes I bought under the table at market stalls because they were technically illegal to sell could dream of doing what this film does. Only today can we make pictures that feel like they could have come from the eighties in an alternate dimension. This one is also a child of the internet age. It’s a gimme for a subset of websites to throw together cheap lists of the film’s top ten grossout moments. People will share scenes on YouTube without context just to gross people out and the few will proudly identify the source. I believe it’s as much a challenge as a feature too, throwing down the gauntlet to see who can top it.

And, because of all that, everything keeps on coming back to Cornelius. Sure, Dirk’s really the hero of the piece but he’s only the hero just as Pam’s the nympho and Jason’s the dweeb and Freddy’s the clown. It’s Cornelius who’s going to show up on most of those YouTube shares because he gets almost nothing to do except prompt us to ask, ‘Oh my God, he’s not going to do that?’ and then do exactly that. Over and over again. Straiton spoke well about his film but I want to read an interview with Wayne R Johnson about why he chose to do this and what he sees his legacy as being. I should also call out Michael Merchant here, as he gets some similar moments as Freddy, including one set that took him three days to shoot in, shall we say, rather trying conditions. His dedication to do that deserves our respect and his ability to stand up in front of a sold out screening and talk about it deserves even more. ‘This is the worst Spring Break ever!’ he cries after one fantastically wrong scene. ‘Well, second worst.’

I should also come back to the production quality. Any detailed synopsis of this film is going to throw up a Troma vibe in anyone who knows what Troma is, but this doesn’t feel like a microbudget film. Straiton was never interested in mining the ‘so bad it’s good’ vein or just lining up a showcase of ickiness to trump the production values. Night of Something Strange will never be mistaken for a $300m James Cameron epic but it does look like a ‘proper film’ with a ‘proper budget’, however little it really cost. Cut out the outrage and it’s nothing special but it’s still capable and still watchable. Add the outrage back in and it’s a picture destined to reach a cult audience. Universities should leave one in every dorm room just to save students from having to discover it themselves. It deserves a run on the big screen just so folk can see it once and then come back to watch other people watch it. Sadly, it’s more likely to be self-distributed and build its audience from festival buzz to rock what’s left of the rental market. Oh, and let’s see the drinking games!

The Dark Tapes (2016)

Directors: Michael McQuown and Vincent Guastini
Writer: Michael McQuown
Stars: Courtney Palm, David Rountree, Shawn Lockie, Stephen Zimpel, Emilia Ares Zoryan, Aral Gibble, Brittany Underwood, Jake O'Conner, Michael Cotter and Tessa Munro

This film was an official selection at the 11th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2016 films.

Each year there’s usually one film that screens at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival that I hate with a passion but it’s usually a showcase feature, like Monster Brawl or Betamax, rather than a movie in competition like this one. That means that it was selected from submissions rather than programmed and I don’t get that. Programming showcase features is an art, especially when you’re often working from the buzz a film has generated without actually having the benefit of seeing it, but screening submissions is a little easier because at least you can watch everything in scope. I have no idea why anyone would choose this film for a festival, but that’s just me. I talked to quite a few other festival-goers and some liked it a lot so maybe it’s just my personal taste. I’ve admitted to not being a fan of found footage films as they often give me motion sickness, but part of it is my OCD railing at the logic behind what we see and this one is a notable failure on that front. It makes no frickin’ sense at all and let me explain that.

This is not just a found footage film, it’s a found footage anthology film and, like most anthology features, we’re given something to frame it and a few short stories to sit within it. Now, with a regular picture that’s fine, especially as that framing device usually features a host or a mechanism which ties the short pieces together, but it’s a rather awkward format for found footage, which is defined by a whole slew of inherent rules: something happened that was worthy of note and was recorded, but only the camera survives, left behind for someone to discover and pass on to us. The freedoms of the format allow (even often require) filmmakers to use cheap equipment, shoot in natural light and not worry about crappy sound. However, a bunch of restrictions creep in too, especially in editing, which can break the internal consistency unless it aims to trim down what’s on a recording to what really matters or to collate footage using a documentary approach. As you can imagine, this is paramount in an anthology or the whole thing breaks.

And this film breaks for a whole bunch of reasons, which is sad because there are a whole bunch of ideas that are worth exploring and might even work outside of the framework which breaks them. The framing story is what this clearly should have been, an experiment by a CalTech professor in applied physics who also has a degree in theology. He’s Martin and he’s taking over a theatre with his TA, Nicole, to validate a theory he has about night terrors. He figures that they really exist, merely moving much too fast for us to notice unless we’re operating on time dilation during REM. They’re not demons, even if the tape is called To Catch a Demon; they’re trans-dimensional entities and he wants to catch them on film using a camera that shoots and plays back super slow motion simultaneously. I love this idea, I like the bizarre places and dilemmas into which it takes the experimenters and I appreciate how it plays ball with the found footage rulebook, creating an imaginative means for a video camera to be left for other people to find.

Unfortunately, it’s just the framing story rather than the feature and it’s when it’s combined with the rest of the stories that the internal consistency falls to pieces. How would the folk who share this footage find any of the footage from the other stories, especially when that footage was never left to be found, would need to be compiled from a variety of different sources (most of which would be technically impossible to acquire) and, in most instances, would have been carefully kept away from prying eyes? Even if, in some inexplicable scenario, they did manage to find all this disparate footage, they wouldn’t collate it together in this fashion anyway for reasons that I can’t go into because they would constitute spoilers. Let me just say that only the third of the stories has any real connection to the framing piece or, indeed, is viable for publishing to an audience. I did like one of the other two stories but given that its entire point is to have no business being in a found footage movie, it absolutely shouldn’t be here at all.

That’s The Hunters and the Hunted, the first segment, and it would work rather well as a standalone film as it’s a regular horror short with a twist which merely happens to be shot without conventional cameras. In fact, it would benefit from losing most of its jerky handheld camerawork to rely instead on a collection of cams. The only segments worthy of a handheld camera are the bookends, the first of which has David introducing his blindfolded wife to their new home, only to find that it may be haunted. It’s a neat choice of location with a really nice spiral staircase that I’d love to have in my house and the usual progression of supernatural events is handled well enough. They hear footsteps and stuff moves or falls over and we wonder why we’re watching something so clichéd but then David wakes up with a huge handprint on his back and we understand why they call in PIPP. That’s the Pacific Institute of Paranormal Phenomenon (sic) and they bring some welcome humour into the piece before we reach the twist.

It’s a good little movie, if it wasn’t stuck in this framework, with decent acting and some agreeably creepy shots of David and Karen’s dead daughter Ashen. Sadly it is stuck in this framework, where it should have never been put without a further twist on the twist to make it viable. The second short, Cam Girls, isn’t as strong and it makes even less sense for this framework. I’m all for a couple of lesbians doing a cam show and I’m all for one of them rebelling against a devout Christian upbringing. I’m especially for her thinking that she might be possessed as that opens up a realm of possibilities, but none of the rest makes a jot of sense. What sort of cam show gets run like a lottery? Come to think of it, what sort of cam show features girls who don’t get undressed? And why would Jerry not disconnect the moment Caitlin gets too freaky on him, especially as he doesn’t even get to see a pair of boobs for his troubles? Emilia Ares Zoryan is good as Caitlin but absolutely nothing here makes sense and I nearly threw my hands up in despair.

Fortunately, the third and final short, Amanda’s Revenge, returns to the initial concept introduced by the framing story, even if it takes its sweet time about it and adds additional weirdness that doesn’t fit at all. The Amanda of the title is a young lady who attends a party where she’s roofied by a couple of guys. The hosts save her from being raped, or at least I think they do, and they beat up the wannabe rapists, but it doesn’t register on Amanda who doesn’t remember a single thing. She appears traumatised anyway and we run through a whole slew of weirdness that doesn’t make any sense at all, but in the end, she returns to the house so her friends can watch her sleeping. While she wasn’t raped earlier, she now believes that she has been raped every night by night terrors and, to capture it, she has antique tech that doesn’t rely on electricity (a vinyl recording device from the 1920s and a 1950s film camera on a spring load). Finally we get somewhere with Brittany Underwood good as Amanda in Oculus territory, but it took its time!

In between each of these shorts, we return to the framing story of To Catch a Demon and wonder why it’s broken up into sections. As always, with this movie, it falls apart when we think about it. The whole point of found footage is that someone found some footage and showed it to us; how they choose to show it is reliant on what they found and what point they want to make and the point here is clearly that scientists have documented creatures that exist at a different speed to us. Oh yeah, that’s worth showing to us! So why do the unknown presenters think it it’s a good idea to break it up into sections? Why do they think it would be enhanced by the shenanigans of David and Karen or by what cam girls Caitlin and Sindy get up to? I see why they might include Amanda’s revenge on the sort of creatures the scientists explained, but how would they get that footage and why would they wait eight years to do so? I have precisely no idea and I’ve spent some time trying to figure it out.

To my mind, this ends up as nothing but a bunch of interesting ideas presented in a horrible fashion and with no thought to logic or purpose. The man behind the concept is Michael McQuown, who wrote all of it and directed each of the shorts; Vincent Guastini directed the wraparound To Catch a Demon segment. I wonder how he figured it would work. His ideas are good, with the exception of Cam Girls, which needs a lot more than a rewrite to render viable, but his execution doesn’t make any sense. Why name that story for something that the story itself says doesn’t exist? Why keep it brief and broken, when it has potential enough to be something substantial? Why add in unrelated and unrelatable stories to bulk up the running time to feature length instead of building it into a strong short? Why not release those shorts separately, especially The Hunters and the Hunted, which would stand much better on its own? I don’t understand in the slightest how this grew the way it did but I know that it’s a shame.

The Cruel Tale of the Medicine Man (2015)

Director: James Habacker
Writer: James Habacker
Star: James Habacker, Jillian McManemin, Joe Coleman, Stormy Leather, Julie Atlas Muz and Camille Habacker

This film was an official selection at the 11th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2016 films.

I’m really interested to discover what audience The Cruel Tale of the Medicine Man ends up finding. Sure, it has a built in core audience that has surely already pre-ordered it but, while it’s a quality piece that will hook new eyes at film festivals, those eyes will be inconsistently drawn because it’s going to seem out of place pretty much anywhere it plays. I found it at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, competing as a horror feature. A horror feature? ‘If you can call it that, really,’ was James Habacker’s apt response in his Q&A. No, it’s not really a horror feature though it shares origins with the horror genre in fairy tales and Elizabethan horror plays via the Grand Guignol, that French theatre which gave its name to entertainment featuring graphic horror portrayed without morals. This film is very much a Grand Guignol performance in itself, even as it showcases others within, and that’s going to challenge people. It’s likely to impress those who already know what Grand Guignol is, but I want to meet those intrigued by this film to look it up.

It clearly belongs to James Habacker, who wrote, produced, directed and co-edited the picture. He is also responsible for providing its key set, the Theatre Diaboliq at the House of Choade, given that in reality it’s the Slipper Room in Manhattan, which he founded in 1999 and still runs today. The biggest plus point this film has is its authenticity, which begins with the venue and continues with the cast, most of whom either play fictional versions of themselves or perform routines that they perform at the Slipper Room for real. It has to be said that, while many horror directors mine this subculture in their work, none has comparable access to the sheer diversity of talent that Habacker has. Don’t just look at those on stage in this picture, look into the audience and be subsumed into the world of performance art on the Lower East Side. What seems like everyone who’s watching the performances within a performance has a body suit, a drawn-on moustache or an animal mask but not one of them feels like an actor. It’s just who they are.

Conversely, the biggest minus point to many audience members is going to be the theatricality that can’t be ignored. I’m not just talking about what these performers do as they perform on the Theatre Diaboliq stage; I’m talking about how they continue when they step off it. Habacker himself is the epitome of this. As Mr Choade, the director of the House of Choade, he’s a glorious creation: a faded impresario with a top hat, frilly shirt and platform boots; he sports the white gloves of a prestidigitator and wields the cane of a gentleman; he’s largely hidden behind a prosthetic proboscis that puts Cyrano de Bergerac to shame and a bushy false moustache reminiscent of Groucho Marx. He delivers like Groucho too, with a smörgåsbord of rapid fire one liners and bad puns told with superb comedic timing but little emotion, though Habacker cites W C Fields as his chief influence. This is all fantastic on the House of Choade stage but what’s odd is how he stubbornly remains within this character off it too, to run his theatre. That’s challenging.

This theatricality is not just restricted to Mr Choade either but to others too, especially the Medicine Man of the title, portrayed by the legendary Joe Coleman, a painter, writer, performer and collector of oddities. In scenes late in the film which I won’t spoil, he’s a natural, a performer utterly in his element effortlessly commanding our attention. However, before we get to that point, he’s an unapologetic ham, reminding of Ted V Mikels as he chews all the scenery he can find in a woodland cabin populated with wonders brought from his Odditorium. Clearly this is deliberate theatricality, so we can’t condemn his poor acting. We have to ask instead why he, and others, adopted this approach; the key may be in a scene back at the theatre. The House of Choade audience is used to outrageous performances and they lap them up, including the gory Grand Guignol plays with obvious blood squibs in abundance. However, these are clearly fake and when one such performance seems real (because it is), that audience becomes acutely uncomfortable.

So, I believe that Habacker realised that his story, which has Choade supply the souls of showgirls to the Medicine Man in return for the elevation of his theatre to ‘a temple of high art’, would be inappropriately disturbing if played straight, a tone that wouldn’t serve well to showcase either his performers or the big community of neo-burlesque which the Slipper Club had helped to build. Instead he chose to phrase the entire film as a performance, in the process emphasising what these players do best, as, after all, most of them are performers rather than actors, each with their own skillset which may or may not translate into selling their characters in a feature film. In other words, we should think of this less as a movie and more as a variety show at the Slipper Room. If we consider Habacker as not really playing Choade but an actor who plays Choade with method dedication, everything makes sense. Similarly, Coleman plays layers: an outrageous Victorian stage actor playing the Medicine Man as a Victorian stage Devil.

To love the film, I believe you have to get past this layer of abstraction. If you can’t manage that, at least you have Jillian McManemin to watch. She’s the character who leads us into this performance by showing up at the House of Choade to confidently interview for a cocktail waitress job that doesn’t exist. She finds herself dancing for stage manager Bitsy McGuffin instead, auditioning for the stage role vacated by Kitty who was killed during Choade’s knife throwing act. She sees the assistant cleaning up her blood but goes ahead anyway. Hey, it’s show business, right? McManemin is both delightful and capable as Linda, even if she (McManemin not Linda) auditioned as crew rather than cast. Fortunately Habacker saw her potential and gave her the lead. She sells the role well, whether it’s as the sweet new fish trying to fit in, the darker girl with a history hinted at in nightmarish flashbacks or the carnal creature in bed with butch Roxy who, courtesy of the talented Stormy Leather, is clearly the best traditionally acted character in the film.

Fairy tales are usually cautionary in nature and this film is certainly phrased like one. Linda finds herself promptly down a rabbit hole and the warnings come quickly, especially from Scarlet, an experienced girl in the company who enters the film in tears and exits it in the way she suggests she will during her plea for Linda to get out fast. But fairy tales are also very dark, if you go to the original stories rather than the sanitised Disney versions, and they’re often as cruel as the title of this picture suggests. Using the Slipper Room, its regular performers and its audience as a fantastic backdrop and Grand Guignol as a framework, Habacker capably fashions an original fairy tale that warns us not about what might happen if we fail but what might happen if we succeed. The ending is a particularly neat one which can easily be read in a few different ways, depending on our personal predilections. The more focused story about Choade and the Medicine Man is resolved without any particular surprise, but the wider one about Linda remains cleverly open, especially if we read into the stage name that she picks.

Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed this film, though I’m aware that it certainly isn’t for everyone and some of the reasons why became quickly apparent during the Q&A session with Habacker. Audience members asked about his influences and generally didn’t get the answers they expected, because, as I mentioned earlier, this really isn’t a horror movie. Sure, I could see Ted V Mikels in Joe Coleman’s performance, and others raised 1970s exploitation flicks like The Wizard of Gore and Bloodsucking Freaks, but Habacker didn’t seem like he knew what those were. He likes Hammer Horror and Vincent Price, but his influences are either in the stage, from sources that also influenced gore pioneers like Joel M Reed and Herschell Gordon Lewis, or from the New York underground film scene. Certainly, there are easy comparisons to be made, both of those films revolving around real death during stage performances, but I’d suggest that if Habacker had grown up as a grindhouse fan, this would look more like The Burlesque Assassins.

The film influence that leapt out to me wasn’t a grindhouse movie but a precode classic: Tod Browning’s Freaks. Like Habacker, Browning had grown up around performers, having run away to join the circus at sixteen. Many of his films are set in circuses with circus performers, not uncommon for the time, but they stand out from the crowd for their sympathetic portrayal of the unusual people. We can see this in films like The Unholy Three and The Unknown, both of which starred Lon Chaney, whose own background was in vaudeville, but it’s especially obvious in Freaks. In framing a love triangle between a dwarf, a trapeze artist and a strongman, Browning used the old moral of Beauty and the Beast, namely that Beauty was really a beast and the Beast the only beauty. His title refers both physically to the freakshow performers and morally to the normal people, beautiful outside but ugly inside. As Browning did in Freaks, Habacker depicts his own unusual folk here with respect and honour by merely treating them like people.

A great example is Mat Fraser, whose Facebook page is named for a quote from Freaks. He appears here only as an actor playing a character, whether he’s playing drums in the House of Choade house band or sitting down in a booth to talk to his boss. There’s no mention made of the fact that he’s clearly disabled because in the context of the theatre, nobody cares; it’s literally unworthy of comment because he’s one of them, to return to that quote. Only we up here in the cheap seats care that his part is listed in the end credits as Sealboy because he was born with thalidomide-induced phocomelia but, frankly, why should it matter? I thoroughly appreciated the way in which The Cruel Tale of the Medicine Man embraces the unusual by treating it as routine. I also thoroughly appreciated the selection of this film for the IHSFFF, even if it’s not a horror movie. It’s a film that deserves to be seen and I hope it continues to find screens in places it doesn’t quite fit and slowly gather fans by shocking and beguiling them. Gooble gobble, indeed.

The House on Pine Street (2015)

Directors: Aaron and Austin Keeling
Stars: Emily Goss, Taylor Bottles, Cathy Barnett, Jim Korinke, Natalie Pellegrini and Tisha Swart-Entwistle

This film was an official selection at the 11th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2015 films.

The buzz was strong for The House on Pine Street and the screening I attended at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival was sold out. It had premiered in February at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, where the San Jose Mercury News called it out as one of the '6 Films You Need to See' from a schedule of two hundred from over fifty countries. Yet, while there are certainly a lot of positive aspects to the movie, especially given that it was made by a pair of recent film school graduates, Aaron and Austin, the Keeling brothers, there are also a lot of negative aspects that challenged my ability to like the film. While the end credits rolled, I found myself puzzling over certain scriptmaking decisions that broke what the film should have been. Most notably, while the Keelings had a strong and innovative idea to bring to bear, they were unable to really integrate it into their script, making the last third of the picture feel like a cheat and the ending much too drawn out. It should have finished twenty or thirty minutes earlier.

The idea is the strongest aspect, backed up by an excellent cast and some very capable crew, but it's not anything I can elaborate on without providing spoilers. Let's highlight instead that the Keelings are clearly idea filmmakers, with the synopsis of a previous film, Modern Ruins, not only intriguing on its own merits but surely influential on the evolution on this, their debut feature. It's a half hour short revolving around a young lady who struggles to stay sane at a friend's party while being followed by a camera crew that only she can see. That sounds like a surrealistic take on this feature, the sort of thing that Luis Buñuel ought to find interesting if he were still alive today, as this is a claustrophobic tale of another young lady who may also be less than sane and who also finds herself effectively trapped both in a potentially haunted house, into which she's just moved, and in the time honoured position of mother, as she's heavily pregnant. The strained relationship between her and her own mother may well be the key to the whole thing.

The young lady here is Jennifer and her husband is Luke. They're from Chicago, in which Jenny would love to still be living, but they're being set up in a house back in Kansas by her mother, Meredith. Jenny resists from the outset but doesn't appear to have much say in the matter, not least because Meredith isn't the sort of person anyone can say no to and make it stick, but also because she had a history in Chicago that is probably best left behind. The suggestion early on is that she had mental problems that affected more than merely herself and details provided later in the film emphasise that. So she's stuck in Kansas, close to mum and with Luke eager to help but reluctant to listen. That's an excellent setup for a haunted house film, which is what this quickly becomes, because Jenny is, of course, the only one who sees things, hears things or encounters things, most of which fall into the usual categories: mysterious knocks that can't be traced to a source, doors that open on their own and things that move about inexplicably.

Emily Goss is a powerful lead, gifted with most screen time by far and able to make it work. I bought into the emotions that raged around and within Jenny, especially because Cathy Barnett is just as outstanding as her mother, Meredith. I was shocked to discover that this picture is only Barnett's second IMDb credit, a full nine years after her first, in which she played the stepmother of the title character in Raising Jeffrey Dahmer, as she carried her part like a former star moving into character roles and demonstrating her true talent. For all that Aaron and Austin Keeling, who wrote, produced and directed the film, are brothers, this is a very female-oriented film, suggesting that their co-writer, Natalie Jones, had a substantial amount of input into the script. Men get very little screen time and, when they do, they don't get much to do with it. When one finally shows up in the script and the house with potential, he's exposed as a charlatan. That a man gets to expound the central idea at the end is somewhat offensive and certainly not appreciated.

While Jenny, and everyone else in the film, is American, I felt that she was portrayed with a great deal of European flavour, not only through her character but in how she's treated by the camera. It's an original story, but it would be believable to read it as an American remake of a French film; that's how focused it is on women and the depths of their characters. Even as what can only be described as the victim of the piece, the lead character who is tormented by the house which she can't escape and ignored by anyone to whom she attempts to relate this, Jenny is still a strong woman fully capable of strong acts. Of course, her manipulative mother is just as strong, which is neatly ironic, given where this really goes in the end. This is a power struggle as much as anything else, merely manifested in supernatural ways, and there's enough depth to explore to provide the basis of a worthy thesis. It's surprising for this to show up in an American horror movie and I doff my hat in respect to the Keelings for making it happen.

The unfortunate flipside to all this oestrogen-drenched suspense is that the men are almost worthless in this picture. Taylor Bottles is perfectly capable as Luke and Jim Korinke does a solid job as Walter Vance, a friend of Meredith's whose self-proclaimed paranormal abilities suggest that he's that one male character with potential, but neither of them really get much to do. Luke, in particular, is written very strangely. He feels like a plot twist always ready to happen but which never does. Sure, he's obviously stuck between a rock and a hard place, but that doesn't excuse many of his actions. If anything, he feels more out of place in Jenny's story than the potential ghosts haunting his house. Compared to Meredith's terminal bitchiness and Jenny's frustration, it's often hard to focus in on the fact that he's even in some of these scenes. He could easily have been cut entirely or reduced to a mere egg donor for a lesbian Jenny and an imaginary girlfriend. That would have made more sense in the bigger scheme of things.

The biggest changes needed are certainly to the last third of the film, which arguably should have been cut too. For the entire running time, we're presented with a situation and asked to fathom whether it's all really happening or whether it's just in the broken mind of its lead character. Both angles are built well, through clever construction of tension by the Keelings (Aaron also edited), strong cinematography from Juan Sebastian Baron and a decent score by Nathan Matthew David and Jeremy Lamb. Everything would have worked much better if we had been left to figure out which we favour, internally as the end credits rolled and verbally with fellow patrons after the screening. There's even a single shot, perhaps twenty or thirty minutes from the end, that would have served as the perfect point to finish. However, it carries on regardless for a protracted finalé that includes an explanation delivered out of nowhere (that isn't either of the two angles we're weighing) and a set of small endings that only serve to diminish the film.

I have to congratulate Aaron and Austin Keeling for putting together and completing an indie feature film in the US that had so much potential to do something different. For all the layers of haunted house cliché we wade through, this is never a conventional haunted house story. In fact, truth be told, it's not really a horror movie at all, more of a drama that wears horror clothing for effect. The first apparition, that shows up tellingly right after the housewarming party that Meredith springs on her daughter, apparently out of spite, is superbly handled; no wonder Walter says that the house has an interesting energy! The addition of a neighbour, Marlene, who drinks when talking about the house, brings welcome cookies but won't set foot inside and who has a pair of daughters with selective mutism, adds magnificently to the freaky feel. There's so much effectively set into motion that I can't help but look forward to the Keelings' next movie, because there's greatness in them. They just need the experience to know what they have.

And, for all that they do so many things right here, it's that lack of experience that wins out in the end. I was caught up in their ride for a long while, but they couldn't bring it home and, in trying to add more to the film, they only managed to throw a lot of it away. What they should have thrown away was twenty or thirty minutes of footage and ended the film that much sooner. This could have become worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as other challenging genre explorations of the female psyche like Wound, The Babadook or, most closely, House of Good and Evil, but in the end it falls apart on itself. People have told me in the past that reviews of mine that I felt were negative inspired them to go and see those films rather than avoid them. I can imagine this one being another such review, so I should end it with a note of caution. I'd recommend that, if you find this review intriguing, you seek out The House on Pine Street, but leave or switch it off when there's a body on the lawn. It'll play so much better that way.

Blood Punch (2013)

Director: Madellaine Paxson
Stars: Milo Cawthorne, Olivia Tennet and Ari Boyland

This film was an official selection at the 11th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2015 films.

Winner of the Audience award at last year's Dances with Films and the Best Horror Feature award at this year's International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, amongst a bundle of others, Blood Punch is a real peach of a movie, even if it didn't look like it should be on paper. There are a bunch of reasons why it shouldn't work, from the working title that stuck, even though it has nothing to do with anything; the clichéd setup (shenanigans at a hunting lodge on cursed tribal land); and the fact that almost everyone involved got to know each other on Power Rangers RPM: all three of the leads, many of the supporting cast, the director, writer and probably the kid who served breakfast every morning. Yet I haven't had this much fun with an indie movie in years. The title really doesn't matter, the clichés quickly fall away to expose a deceptively intricate story with a set of neat little twists and hey, who cares where they met? What matters is that it's as unlike Power Rangers as can comfortably be imagined, with drugs, death and bad language in droves.

In fact, it's not particularly like anything else. It's a horror feature, sure, but not primarily, however much blood gets spilled and however supernatural the concept. It's a black comedy long before that and it's a modern film noir first and foremost. In fact, it's a quintessential film noir, with almost the entire running time devoted to three characters stuck in a love triangle set up for criminal purposes and presided over by a sassy femme fatale. She's Skyler and she starts out the picture in rehab, not to get off drugs but to hire herself a capable cook to turn 110 pounds of pseudoephedrine into an insanely large batch of crystal meth in a single day, enough to make them rich before they can ever be raided. She leaps into bed with Milton, a bright student in rehab for running a meth lab out of college and he immediately falls hard for her. Only in the sack does she explain to him that the third and last in the gang is Russell, her 'pure 100% psychopath' boyfriend. Shenanigans immediately ensue and continue on for the rest of the movie.

Now, if that doesn't sound particularly supernatural, I should highlight that the very beginning of the film, before we even get to rehab, happens a day later, with Milton puking his guts up and finding a video tape containing a message for him from himself. He doesn't remember recording it, but it's definitely him and, to ensure that he listens to himself, he very deliberately chops off two of his fingers with a cleaver. Given that the present day Milton isn't missing any digits, it succeeds in grabbing both his attention and ours in the cheap seats. The script is by Eddie Guzelian and it's a real gem. He hooks us at the outset with Milton and his supernatural video on Tuesday morning, then jumps back to rehab on Monday to ground us in the basic crime and the dark but comedic tone of the piece and moves on carefully so that when we return to Milton in the bathroom we know a lot more than we did first time around. He's more than happy to set us up with odd little clues here and there, but waits 43 minutes to hit us with the big twist.

I'm in two minds whether to spoil that twist because it's hard to talk about the film without it, but I guess I should let you discover it for yourself. I can safely add that there are quite a few more twists to follow the main one too, because the entire script is a clever little set of puzzles, both for the three leads and for us, and we're all happy to try to solve them. Every time we solve one, and some of them are much easier to figure out than others, Guzelian emphasises another angle that means that we have to keep on puzzling for a little while longer. M Night Shyamalan made a career out of one big twist per movie; Guzelian gives us one great big twist here, then adds another three excellent little ones before the end credits roll. I'd be all over IMDb looking up what other movies he's written, but his long and respected career has, up to this point, been hilariously restricted to children's television, with his most adult work prior to this film being perhaps his three episodes of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. Not a lot of blood in there!

Let's just say that this riffs on the old 'Indian burial ground' theme, but never in the usual way, as the low budget was never going to extend to zombie hordes and didn't need to. The majority of the movie follows only three actors in three locations, but never once even hints at getting boring. There's Milton and Skyler at the rehab clinic, picking up Russell the psycho state trooper on the way out. There's the three of them at the hunting lodge, with a wild collection of dangerous weapons on the walls which surely all get put to use sooner or later. And eventually there's the lair of Archer, the man to whom Skyler plans to sell all the crystal Milton will cook up at the lodge. That's not a lot of opportunity for cinematographer Neil Cervin to keep everything looking fresh, but he does a solid job, aided by the neat surreality that Guzelian conjures up with his Coen Brothers-esque take on Luis Buñuel. He's the big star here, not only for his ideas but for his dialogue too, which is plentiful and agreeably sardonic.

Olivia Tennet gets the best of that dialogue as Skyler. The first time through I wondered if she was a little too young for a character with such assurance and experience, but there are layers to what she does and she delivers her lines with panache. It helps that she plays an interesting character too, independent but under Russell's thumb, tough but submissive. She's manipulative in the extreme, as every femme fatale worth her salt has to be, and that could well include her classic battered wife syndrome dialogue, as she often repeats Russell's questions to her verbatim to underline his power over her. Ari Boyland has a blast playing Russell, even if he's too nice a person to nail as many of his psychoses as he'd like. He certainly has some strong moments but he's just not enough of a lunatic to be the devil that Skyler makes out. He also has the most limited part of the three, without real growth as a character, for very good reasons that I'm completely unable to go into without providing spoilers.

That leaves Milo Cawthorne as Milton, who is the character with the real story arc. He starts the picture as nobody but promptly becomes somebody, even if it isn't who he'd like. With Russell far from the brightest bulb in any pack, it falls to Milton to figure out what's going on and how to beat it. The unspoken question is always whether he'll get to outwit Skyler in the process, because she's no dummy and clearly looks out for number one under every circumstance imaginable. It's also telling that Cawthorne manages to garner a great deal of sympathy from us, even though he's a drug dealer when we first meet him and escalates from there into a callous and thoughtless murderer. Then again, Tennet manages to find a little sympathy for the sociopathic Skyler too by manipulating us as much as she does Milton, Russell and everyone else she meets. We really shouldn't feel for any of these characters but, by the end of the film, we can't quite help feeling just a little even for poor psychopathic Russell.

There are problems here, but they're mostly minor and ignorable. Director Madellaine Paxson does more with her limited budget than many would manage, but most will notice it at some point or other. For me it was most obvious in the cheap and cheerful credits and the public domain songs (and songs by members of the cast) which accompany the solid score by Adam Berry, not to mention the limited cast and location lists. I don't see any of these as a problem, but others might when the film inevitably makes it out beyond the indie festival circuit to the wider public. One detail that did annoy me was how much storage Russell's police car has for its onboard surveillance camera. I might kill for a hard drive like that and land myself in the same trouble these crooks find themselves in here; that could have been handled differently without losing any of the effect, but it's hardly important in the grand scheme of things. I certainly can't fault the progression at the heart of the story, even if I didn't see every cue first time through.

At the end of the day, this is one of those little pictures that could and I'll happily pimp it out to everyone who will listen. It's a twist movie but it's worth watching more than once. It's a dialogue heavy film with a dearth of characters but a lot of action. It's a low budget picture that looks far better than it should, given the cost. It certainly isn't remotely like what you might expect from a debut director whose previous work was on Peter Rabbit, the co-writer of Disney's Cinderella III: A Twist in Time and a cast of Power Rangers RPM alumni. It has more drugs than an Irvine Welsh novel, more bad language than a Steven Seagal flick and more death than a Lucio Fulci picture. And yet it's a film noir, brought up to date with blood like Sam Raimi's and dialogue like the Coen Brothers. Imagine an Ealing comedy remade by Takashi Miike. That's how out there this manages to go, but that clever script by Eddie Guzelian never loses focus. Hopefully the success of this will mean that he'll never have go back to the Mini Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

B-Class Cultural Heritage (2013)

Director: Yuji Hariu
Stars: Juya Kasuga, Jiro Kurosawa, Raiki Komino, Masao Yamamura, Shinichiro Kanamaru and Reisa Maekawa

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

If DOUG.DAT and Sad Monster disappointed me, the final sci-fi short shown at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2014 elated me. B-Class Cultural Heritage was stunning on the big screen, as much for how utterly different it was from everything else around it as for what it actually was in itself, but for me it was a breath of fresh air. It certainly didn't hurt that Yuji Hariu, the film's writer, editor, director and effects wizard, flew out from Japan for the festival with an absolutely stunning interpreter in tow. I believe that my better half is still jealous that I got to talk to her after the screening, but hey, Hariu's English was about as weak as my Japanese; we both have a few words here and there but no fluency. She did a great job helping us communicate and merely happened to look drop dead gorgeous while doing so. Somehow this was all highly appropriate because this is perhaps the most quintessentially Japanese film I've ever been privileged to watch. Perhaps it's the 21st century equivalent to all those Yasujiro Ozu classics.

What happens is easy to describe but tough to relate because it makes more sense the more background a particular viewer might have in Japanese culture. We're watching Akira, a skateboarder played by Junya Kasuga but presumably named for the actual skater doing the stuntwork, Akira Imamura. He answers his phone to hear a typically kawaii voice tell him that he's standing on a forbidden manhole, one registered under the B-Class Cultural Heritage Association. As he looks down, she explains that, 'As a penalty of this violation we will viciously attack you for the next 3 minutes.' She really isn't kidding either, adding that, 'If you do not die, we'd like to present you a special prize!' She even finishes with a cute, 'Good luck!' as the manhole lifts and some sort of laser weapon peers out from underneath, focusing on Akira's chest. It waits politely for those three minutes to begin and he discovers that he needs to be off and running with great speed! I don't believe this film could remotely work in any other culture, but here it's perfect.

It isn't just the concept that's quintessentially Japanese. The film itself is produced with technical aplomb that is consistent in every aspect. There are many more laser guns, of course, and an abundance of neat explosions. Nobody else seems to notice, which is a notable comment in itself. The weaponry gets bigger and more powerful as the clock runs down, carefully concealed within other mundane objects registered by the B-Class Cultural Heritage Association like traffic lights and railroad crossings. Hariu's effects work is exemplary, never taking over the film but working hand in hand with the cinematography of Kazuhisa Maruyama who, like Hariu, doesn't appear to have earned another credit at IMDb. His camera is notably in tune with the story, with a number of scenes tailored around the choreography. One has a young man drop a coin as he prepares to put it into a vending machine. Leaning down to get it, Akira leaps over him on his skateboard and a gun rakes across the machine, shocking the clueless young man as he stands.

Everyone involved warrants praise. I don't know if Hariu or Maruyama was responsible for the use of slow motion, but one of the most tired effects in film looks utterly fresh here because this is precisely what slo-mo is for. There's a great use of dolly work to lift the camera above the city as Akira turns and look down at his progress. The editing is razor sharp, courtesy of Hariu in collaboration with Tomoyuki Kujirai and Masaki Mizuno, who both also worked with him on the visual effects. That editing works seamlessly with a wonderful use of subtitles and credits, which never settle for boring old conventions. Transitions between shots look wonderful too. The electronic score by Jaermulk Mansfield and Soichi Terada is appropriate for the action, the insanity and the inevitable irony waiting for the conclusion. Everything is perfect, down to the awesomely underwhelming prize for survival. This was the best way to finish up a sci-fi shorts set and I've enjoyed it many times since, courtesy of the DVD Hariu gave me. Arigatou gozaimasu, Yuji-san!

B-Class Cultural Heritage can be watched for free on Vimeo and YouTube.

Sad Monster (2013)

Director: Kurt Dettbarn
Stars: Maja Dettbarn, Matt Washington and Kurt Dettbarn

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

I was disappointed by DOUG.DAT, increasingly as I think about what the concept could have become, and I was disappointed by Sad Monster too. It got a good response from the crowd at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival though, so it certainly has something. What I thought it had was a strong visual style drawn out of the inherently sentimental material. I didn't like the shakycam but I loved the long shots and the framing and the gradual bringing into focus of little things as the camera moves. It's surprising that it has won many awards for producer/director Kurt Dettbarn, but apparently nothing for Joshua Rainhard as the cinematographer. To my thinking, it's Rainhard who sells this most, with the monster suit made by Melis Bayraktar, Trason Fernandes and Jen Wright backing him up magnificently and Dettbarn's suitably melancholy music underpinning it all. There is no dialogue in this movie, which could easily be regarded as a music video, but then it really doesn't need it.

The story is elegantly simple. The Sad Monster of the title is some sort of cuddly plush troll, but he's sad rather than scary, right down to the single fang that decorates his bottom lip. Why he's seven feet tall, I have no idea, given that he's clearly supposed to belong to the little girl who banishes him at the outset, but he is and that means that he can leave and wander off into the world at large, searching for another place where he can belong. You could read this like a dialogue free summary of Toy Story in music video form and without a single moment of CGI, but that would suggest depth and this deliberately avoids that. It merely highlights how a single act can change everything, one command turning a world upside down, especially when it's delivered by a child, here Dettbarn's daughter Maja. It works well, but that simplicity is a double edged sword. It delivers the sentimentality that Dettbarn clearly aimed for, but leaves us no way to really connect with our sympathy and we sit back as the credits roll and wait for the next film.

Sad Monster can be watched for free on Vimeo.

DOUG.DAT (2013)

Director: Christopher Rowell
Stars: Rich Slaton, Hannah Prichard, Charlie Messenger and Joseph Steven

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

If you have any background in IT, the title of this film might speak to you. If you don't, let me explain the basic concept. A .dat file is simply a data file, a combination of ones and zeroes that has meaning when run through the right program. Here, that's an emulator, not one that we might run ourselves to emulate an old game system and run its old games, but a human being emulator, built by a man called Hobbes to run a man named Doug, digitally generated from the detailed image stored in an MRI scan. Clearly we're in the far future, given that DOUG.DAT is running on a QT-CPU, presumably a computer built on quantum tunnelling technology, with one petabyte of RAM. That's serious equipment, if you don't know the terms, but that just makes it all the more frustrating to see it physically represented in Hobbes' lab by recycling of hardware already obsolete to us today. Such are the drawbacks of making a short film without budget enough to let a technological imagination run loose. I've only seen Restitution ever get round that.

As the film begins, we're with the real Doug, or Douglas Grayson, to provide his full name, as he waits to have his MRI done. He's taking a sick day because he thinks something is seriously wrong. Dad suggests that it's just stress but he reckons he has microscopic tumours or some such. It's refreshingly banal and ultimately meaningless, which may be a succinct summary of Doug's entire life. However, after he finds himself placed into a completely different context, banal and meaningless can become important. I was more impressed by how this film addresses the concept of time than in the tech that allows Hobbes and Madeline to do what they do and the little drama that surrounds them as they're doing it. I only buy the ending in spirit though. This is an interesting concept, but it's sadly wrapped up in conventional clothes and can be torn apart easily; it deserved a better treatment. That said, I still enjoyed it being raised and thank writer/director Christopher Rowell and his very capable actors for that.

My Date with Adam (2013)

Director: Dennis Schebetta
Stars: Tressa Glover, Brian Morvant and Julianne Avolio

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

If Passing was a good story marred by a variety of technical concerns, My Date with Adam is a good story marred by circumstance. Technically, this one's accomplished, with excellent lead actors, great support and no technical issues to speak of. The tone is fun and the infectious humour makes the fifteen minutes zoom along like five. The problem is that the first half is entirely given away by the synopsis, the poster and everything else advertising the film, while the second half is utterly obvious, unfolding throughout as expected by everyone with no surprises whatsoever to be found. There's nothing here to compare to the depth of Passing, with its concepts on top of concepts pouring out of conversation like a couple of writers brainstorming a novel. This is a romantic comedy, pure and simple, merely one that happens to involve a robot along with its pretty girl. Fortunately it's still an indie short romantic comedy, so it contains none of the brain melting horror you might expect if a robot was thrown into a Hollywood romcom feature.

It's the lead actors who make the film. Tressa Glover is very believable as Sarah, a young lady who wants to find the perfect man before she turns thirty and she's running out of time. No conventional beauty, she still exudes sex appeal and good looks and would surely have no shortage of offers; if only she might be willing to settle for anyone less than perfect. She knows perfect exists, because she works as a wedding planner and, among all the nightmares she encounters apparently daily in her professional life, she does see those magic moments too when everything goes right and everyone goes aah. Brian Morvant is very believable as Adam, her last chance date who seems to be very promising online but is a little less so in person. 'I'm not very good at small talk,' he explains on their first date and he's right. He has trouble with humour as well and doesn't seem to be quite all there. One odd twitching problem and off he runs in a nervous hurry, quickly blaming a migraine for his failings.

The point, of course, is that Adam is a robot, which wouldn't be too surprising to anyone who hadn't read the synopsis or looked at the poster but is spoiled there because we have a second half to the film. After a successful second date, he takes her home, they kiss, he sparks and collapses to the ground and a van of stereotypical nerds drive up to whisk him away for repairs. Their leader is Philip and Brian Morvant has a lot of fun playing him too. With Morvant's versatility in a double role and Sarah's glorious meltdown at Perfect Weddings, this unfolds very nicely indeed, but there isn't an moment of surprise to be found as it does so. Perhaps if I'd watched this as a romantic comedy, I might have been happier, because romcoms need characters and charisma, which this has in spades, over originality. However, I watched it as a sci-fi short and so I wanted original ideas to go along with the fun. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but believe it would have played better at the Phoenix Film Festival proper rather than within its horror/sci-fi track.

Passing (2013)

Director: Stephen Sherwood
Stars: Jim Gray, John Schmedes and Barb Foran

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

A couple of longer mid-set films, Passing and My Date with Adam are both substantial character studies, using science fiction tropes to tell very human stories. They're both flawed but interesting short films, but the flaws and the interest arrive in completely different ways. Passing goes for a deep, fleshed out set of ideas that are initially a little obscured but eventually focus in on what's really going on. However, rather than that revelation being a twist finalé, it's more like the midpoint, because the characters important to the progression of the ideas continue on and we find out a lot more about who and what and why. That's why this is a 26 minute picture, but the ending not being the ending is not really why it runs long. That's because many things are just a little bit off, not enough to be bad but enough for us to notice them in an uncanny valley sort of way: the lighting is often a little too bright, quite a few shots feel like almost good greenscreen even if they aren't and the acting is inconsistent.

As I'm finding is often the case, it's the older actors who are more successful. Jim Gray plays the puzzled old guy who answers the door as the picture opens, to let in an old friend played by John Schmedes. John is the former, Michael the latter. Barb Foran is the last of the leads, playing John's wife, Helen. All three of them have not so good moments because they often seem to be trying too hard. It's not that they're bad actors, it's that they seem to be acting on stage and reading for radio, rather than feeling natural in front of a camera. Schmedes is the most successful and all three have plenty of good moments too. I enjoyed watching all of them, but that's the problem; I should be watching their characters rather than the actors portraying them. They're a few rungs up the ladder from the supporting cast though, who I presume are either non-actors or people fresh to the industry who are trying to make their name. They don't impress too much but, to be fair, they get little opportunity to do so. This one's very much for the old folks.

The script by director Stephen Sherwood is more consistently successful, though it could be trimmed. He sets it up nicely through that initial meeting, removing John's befuddlement through Michael pointing out that, 'I'm here about your death.' 'Oh, that,' he replies and they toast, 'To home!' Anyone who misses that moment, which I've unfortunately just highlighted, may find themselves figuring out what's going on. The base idea could be a futuristic technology thing, or an immortality thing or a deal with the devil thing, as there's someone outside in the car that John thinks is 'creepy as Hell.' But, before we get the explanation, we get to watch John have a glorious time with Helen. I did appreciate these scenes, even though they're the least important from a science fiction angle (but perhaps the most important from a dramatic one), as it's always refreshing to watch older characters actually have energy, have sex, have activity in their lives that isn't just playing bingo down at the old folks' home.

Inspired in part, say the credits, by John Scalzi's wonderful novel, Old Man's War, it aims to create a world believable enough to hang a number of concepts off. This may be the most successful angle to the short, as we work through quite a few during the second half and they both keep our attention and send off our minds to ponder on their ramifications. It wouldn't be difficult to build further stories on the universe that we're given a little glimpse of here. Unfortunately the visual side, while again not being bad, doesn't live up to the story that wants more. Most of these concepts appear and disappear during a conversation, as John and Michael set a stage that we never see dressed or acted upon. I did enjoy Passing, but I'm more intrigued in what happens behind its story: what went before, what will come after and what's happening off screen as this little drama unfolds. A tagline for this could be as human as a truism Michael tells John: 'The price of love is loss.' But, as human as this story is, it wants to be a heck of a lot more.

Your Cocoon and You (2013)

Director: Dallin Cerva
Stars: Davey Morrison Dillard, Chase Ramsey and Leslie Hobson

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

After a cute animation, a traditional science fiction drama and a faux commercial, the second sci-fi shorts set at the International Horror & Sci-Film Festival in 2014 continued with something that isn't really a sci-fi film at all. It's an absurdist drama which uses a neatly surreal idea to illustrate how hard some people are with change. Jed shares a house with Tony, but Tony is moving out to get married to Kara and Jed feels he should save him from such a fate. Really he's just struggling with his friend moving on, especially as he's a stereotypical nerd: he's thin and bearded, is covered in zits, can't pogo, watches Santa Claus Conquers the Martians on BluRay, you know... the usual. There are surprisingly few posters on their walls, but there are lifesize Han and Leia cardboard standups watching everything they're doing. Tony forces the change though, literally. The very next day, Jed finds him in his room wrapped up in a giant cocoon hanging from his ceiling. The metaphor couldn't be more obvious. He has to move on to become himself.

I liked Your Cocoon and You because it's hard to dislike it. Jed might be a slob but he's certainly one of the good guys; when it comes down to it, he does everything he can for his friend. Tony might seem a pain in the neck, but he's obviously going through a lot so we can cut him some slack. His fiancée, Kara, the only other character we meet, is actually pretty cool, especially wearing a shirt that makes fun of T Rexes, and she shouldn't make Jed feel as threatened as he feels. The best part is the point where the whole world is about to collapse on Tony, now that he has wings, but Kara delivers a delightfully endearing line to make everything fine again, even if he has such poor taste as to have enjoyed The Boondock Saints. Culturally, bringing in a replica of the Sword of Omens from Thundercats is a more impressive touch. The worst part was the bouncy and intrusive electronic score that distracts rather than emphasises. The wings look cool but also could have looked more real. Mostly, this is well acted and enjoyable, if obvious and simple.

Your Cocoon and You can be watched for free on YouTube.

Enhanced Cellphone of the Future (2013)

Director: Snehal Patel
Star: Andrea Bogart

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

Snehal Patel's faux commercial for a futuristic communicator implant must surely be the shortest film I've ever seen at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival. It might actually be long for a commercial, less than a minute in length even without any credits, which of course would be out of place in such a project. Without a title screen or any names whatsoever, it blips by so fast in a set of shorts that it would be easy for us to blink and miss it. For a little while, I wondered if it was the introduction to a longer short, like the faux commercial that introduces Angel Ruiz's Terminus, but no, it was the entire film and we'd moved on to the next one. Given the inherent restrictions that such a brief opportunity offers, it does wonderfully. It hits all the right notes: the utterly white background, the friendly narration, the slick and seamless effects as the only character we see moves through time, fashion and advancing technology all at once. We can believe this is 2025 AD and there's a lot crammed into this small space.

However, it's such a small space that there's inherently not as much here as there could be in something a lot longer. This is a commercial, pure and simple, without a storyline or any progression other than what it deliberately shows us as its point. Andrea Bogart is perfectly cast as the 'woman transcending time', as she's described in the credits on the film's Vimeo page, but she's doing the job of a model rather than an actress. The people who shine brightest here are the people who make models look great: Desiree Castro, in charge of wardrobe, and Kathryn Fernandez, who took care of the hair. Sure, there are video effects folk aiding them by allowing various model shoots to combine into one gorgeous segue, but it's always a face of a pretty girl that we watch on a commercial, so she can sucker us into the brand being advertised to us in the final shot. Here that's Andrea Bogart selling us the NoMoto E-36 Communicator Implant, with GPSx and Redtooth the neatly extrapolated extras. And at the end of the day, that's successfully all this is.

Enhanced Cell Phone of the Future can be watched for free on Vimeo.

LiFi (2014)

Directors: Preston Peterson and Jason Boesch
Stars: Zachary Ray Sherman, Sun Hong and Jeremy Radin

This film was an official selection at the 10th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2014. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014 films.

I adored LiFi and, as much as I also adored the freaky cyberpunk visuals of The Developer and the quirky Japanese weirdness of B-Class Cultural Heritage, I'd call it easily the best sci-fi short in show. It's nineteen minutes long but it's so relentlessly charming and thoroughly engaging that it feels like half that. It's full of ideas, as all the best science fiction stories are, so much so that they frequently bounce off each other at a rate of knots. It's a story about a single man, a trio of young scientists and a set of potential changes to the human race. It's a light hearted comedy and it's an emotional drama. It's a whole slew of things all at once and yet it never loses its focus. And it has the toughest but most appropriate ending I've seen in years. As soon as the first word of the end credits appears, we throw our hands in the air and scream that Preston Peterson and Jason Boesch, who wrote and directed, gipped us out of a resolution, but, about one second later, we realise that we always had to provide it ourselves. That's the whole point.

This trio are young men working out of what appears to be a well equipped garage or storage container. Allister sounds like Steve Buscemi but is a little nerdier. He teleports an apple from one table to another right before the title appears; that's our starting point. Joon is the inevitable Asian while Marc is the one who looks more like a wrestler than a scientist but sounds perfect. Zachary Ray Sherman, Sun Hong and Jeremy Radin all sell their roles absolutely, because it's never just about their key lines, the ones that are supposed to resonate and have the angel and devil on our shoulders start another ethical discussion; it's about every line, even the throwaway ones that still serve to build their characters as they find their way through the various escalations the script throws at them to the point where they must put their money where their mouths are. This is what science fiction is supposed to be: funny without being outrageous, dramatic without overdoing it, so packed with ideas that they spill out over the edge for us to catch.

We join the film at the point where Allister is feeling very confident, because his apple teleportation was the third consecutive success without a hint of apple sauce, and he wants to talk about the next step. We have working teleportation from the outset, which is enough for many films, but they move on up to dead tissue in the form of a hamburger. It teleports but then explodes, hurtling a bone into Joon's safety shield; they theorise that the various sources for the burger confused their equipment but somehow revitalised bone and hair from the burger's DNA. Soon the others talk him into teleporting Petey, their lab mouse, in the process discovering that their machine isn't just a transporter, it's also a 'genetic cleansing service', because the mouse that comes out the other side has the same DNA as Petey but is missing the scar he wears with pride after nearly losing his liver in an experiment long ago. Suddenly, it isn't just about what they've managed to achieve, it's what else their achievement will become.

All three actors sell their characters well, but they benefit from the dialogue that they're given. The most important line clearly arrives after Marc vocalises what they're all thinking. 'This could change humanity for ever,' he says, and Allister calmly replies, 'Are we ready for that?' Could a species that watches Jersey Shore really be ready for immortality? Well, maybe a species that watches films like LiFi might. All three of these characters are intelligent alpha go-getters, so they're hardly a cross section of modern America, but they are a refreshing trio to watch in a science fiction film. I personally had an absolute blast without having to endure a comic relief idiot dumbing down the intelligence winging its way around their storage locker. I enjoyed the asides, the debates, the very subtle Bones quote, as much as I enjoyed those ethical concerns that proliferate like raindrops. This is the sort of film that we can watch half a dozen times, pick up new issues and sit down with good company to dissect them and what they raise. That's priceless.