Inseparable (2007)

Director: Nick White
Stars: Benedict Cumberbatch and Natalie Press

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.

The oldest film to make the scheduling for Filmstock Arizona, this twelve minute short is a star vehicle for Benedict Cumberbatch, who's having a rather amazing year. In between seasons two and three of the critically acclaimed TV series Sherlock, he knocked out half a dozen pictures, only another short, Little Favour, not being immediately notable. He played the villain in Star Trek into Darkness and the high profile role of Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate, along with others in the controversial 12 Years a Slave and the star-studded August: Osage County. He'll finish it off this month by returning to the part of the Necromancer in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, for which he'll also be voicing the titular dragon. To land a short film starring such a major actor is a solid coup for Filmstock Arizona, even if the piece is six years old. It helps that it's a very powerful film, mostly because of Cumberbatch but also because of the script by Matthew James Wilkinson and the contribution of co-star Natalie Press.

To be fair, while Press does astoundingly good work at the end of this film, she's hardly in it otherwise. There are two leading men and they're both Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays opposite himself. First up, he's Joe, who clearly has a lot on his mind as the film begins. We soon discover, neatly and without the need for words, that it's because he's dying. Sure, he's young and he's smart and he has a beautiful wife and son, but what is presumably inoperable brain cancer doesn't care about such trifles, so Joe has little time left to enjoy any of them. At this point, we find that he's also Charlie, as unruly and unkempt as Joe is composed and neat, especially given the circumstances. It's never stated outright, but Charlie is presumably Joe's twin brother, who has fallen on tough times, apparently because of an addiction to gambling on greyhounds. His life is not looking much more promising than Joe's, but there's a way out and a hint in that direction is where this story takes us.

Cumberbatch is as great here as you might expect from his more recent, more high profile work, even though this was done in 2007. It's never easy to play both halves of a pair of identical twins, because we're inevitably confused between them. Cumberbatch nails this so that we always know precisely who we're looking at, whatever the context we're given. Wilkinson's script is deliberately sparse, eschewing unneeded dialogue for expository visuals and a strong sense that we're merely seeing characters at the moment when one story ends and another begins. The most important stories play out in our minds as we ponder the ramifications of what we see and where they're likely to take the characters on the dark side of the closing credits. This stands alone superbly as a short film, but it could easily be expanded in any number of ways to feature length. I'm almost surprised that nobody's done that yet. Maybe it just wouldn't be financially viable now that the leading men, both of him, are so in demand.

The Things My Father Never Taught Me (2012)

Director: Burleigh Smith
Stars: Burleigh Smith, Bridie Carter, Aiden Papamihail and Isabella Paris Hamer

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.

It's obvious from his consistent use of the Windsor Light Condensed font that Burleigh Smith dreams of being Woody Allen. His frequent choice of relationship comedy as subject matter underlines it, though he cleverly describes himself as 'more neurotic and less talented' than the master. He's also taller and less Jewish, but that doesn't affect the talent that shines out of this seven minute short. As The Things My Father Never Taught Me has been screened at over 120 film festivals in 17 different countries, he's also clearly doing much better than most wannabes. Filmstock Arizona will be the latest chance to see this peach of a short on the big screen and, frankly, every chance is a good one. Beyond being astute and funny, it's also a textbook in how to allow very young child actors to steal a picture without driving adults completely insane. Smith is everywhere here but Aiden Papamihail is as strong a foil for him as Jackie Coogan was for Charlie Chaplin.

Smith plays Melvin, who provides almost every word we hear, either as narration or dialogue, as it's all about him. Once he realised early in life that his father couldn't teach him a single thing about women, he proceeded to figure out all the tricks himself, or so he believes. He also feels that this knowledge is so fundamental that he's driven to pass it on to his own son, Mike, who apparently needs dating advice at the tender age of three. It's a good job that Smith dominates the audio, because as strong as he is, little Aiden Papamihail steals the show out from under him routinely, effortlessly and very effectively indeed. It's no shock, given that the overly confident Melvin has a three year old son but apparently no significant other, to discover how this all ends up but we're taken there very efficiently, through a mix of Melvin's dedication to a crazy task, played delightfully straight, Papamihail's scene stealing antics and the up tempo music of the Texas Gypsies. The choice to shoot in black and white doesn't hurt either.

This was my first experience of Burleigh Smith, but I'll certainly attempt to track down some of his other work, including short films like Then She Was Gone and Love Like You've Never Been Hurt, along with his upcoming feature, You Can't Play the Game if You Don't Know the Rules. He's written every picture he's directed, starred in most of them and edited them too, under the pseudonym of Ross Farnsworth. Reading synopses, he's clearly most at home with relationship comedy; that's hardly surprising, given how straight he plays the role of Marvin, who is so often almost right but never quite there. He's great at making a mild idiot out of himself without ever losing believability; he never becomes a cartoon. He works well with Bridie Carter, the only other adult actor really in the film, who returned from his 2011 short, Ragtime. It's his interactions with his son Mike that really shine though, and how he's affected by the other interactions that those set up. This is a wonderful little short on many fronts.

Gift Rush (2013)

Director: Eva Marquez
Stars: Alejandro Avalos, Libby Cox and Daniel Gomez

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.

The quality of submissions for the IFP Mystery Box challenge was generally high. Even a lesser short like Gift Rush has an overriding sense of fun that can't help but make us smile. It's not a great short by any standard, but it's still a quintessentially enjoyable one, somehow eschewing every detail of reality within a story that plays out in a very real way indeed. It's all about Mike and Cynthia's one year anniversary, which Mike realises on the day that he's forgotten, so he has to scramble to transform abject failure into resounding success before she notices. Applying this at the high school level was a touch of genius, as was the decision to break the laws of physics with ruthless abandon. Either that, or the script is a clever take on the universality of commercial romance, where Mike can apparently acquire the very best that the world has to offer in the five minutes before first class. Maybe he's just thinking in game logic; Mike effectively cries, 'Challenge accepted!' to the romantic challenge within the film challenge. Game on!

It's primarily the story that makes this work so well, because the whole thing is outrageously wrong on every level but somehow rings true nonetheless. It's aided by fast paced editing by Edwin Eliosa and a bouncy, if generic, theme from Daniel Gomez. The fun persists all the way to the twist and the stinger, the brief scene after the credits, which is a neat one. Somehow it manages to survive the acting, which is hardly essential from any of the nine actors. Perhaps it does so through distracting tactics; this runs just under three minutes, including credits, but we're gifted a map to guide us and dialogue in no less than three languages. My OCD may well have shifted me away from the routine actors to wonder about the map. Why does it switch from cities to countries when Mike flits abroad? Nobody knows where Paris is, so we have to go with France? When did South Korea become known for flowers? OCD will tear this film apart, because all the details break it. It's really about feel, and on that front, it made me smile.

Catch the Frog (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Amber Michelle, Michael Coleman, Matthew Crosby, Travis Mills and Anna Grace Bell

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.

It's December already, so here's a fresh Running Wild review to kick off the new month. This one's also an IFP Mystery Box Challenge review, as making 52 shorts in 52 weeks is clearly not challenge enough for Travis and his team so they're filling in odd gaps in their shooting schedules with other challenges too. I liked Catch the Frog and felt that it had a good shot at the technical elements and music awards, but it went home empty handed; there were enough strong entries to split fifteen awards between nine films with only Long Way and Break Down taking three. This one may resonate within Running Wild's own filmography for a number of reasons. It stays truest to the company's name of the many Running Wild films, as it features little more than one long running scene. It plays well as a standalone piece, though it's also a clear experiment to play with the technical elements of a chase. Mills, a noted fan of modern French cinema, also finally made a film that featured only subtitled French dialogue.

What's more, It's a better French spy film than The French Spy, a film that was so overtly experimental that it's easy to now believe that its title character was so good at her job that she eluded the Running Wild crew entirely and showed up in a completely different picture. She appears in the form of Amber Michelle who is on the run from moment one, snatching up a large stuffed frog from an apartment and hightailing it out of there, hotly pursued by Michael Coleman and Matthew Crosby. We aren't given any of the things we might expect from a filmmaker: like names, background details, motivations, anything. All we get is two guys chasing a girl carrying a MacGuffin and we have to fill in the rest. While the final scene tells us the nationality of a pair of players and reveals the title to be a pun to boot, it stops short of fleshing out anyone else. Are Coleman and Crosby FBI, Mossad or Russian intelligence? Who knows? It doesn't matter. What matters is merely that they're chasing the MacGuffin.

Catch the Frog could be an infuriating piece; by the end, we don't know who, what, when, where or how, which makes it even more fluff than Avatar. Every character is an enigma and it has so little story that it can be summed up in the single word, 'chase'. However, it's brought to the screen very capably indeed. The music that runs longer than the visuals, At Iron Mountain by Tired Army, sets the tone perfectly and accompanies it well. The editing, by Mills himself, is very sharp indeed. Most, but not quite everything, follows Russ Meyer's approach of shooting with static cameras and then adding an impression of action through careful editing. This also gives the opportunity to play with focus, many shots having someone moving toward or away from the camera, so coming into focus for a moment then leaving it again. It's a good approach for an elongated chase scene, though this one unfolds in isolation so doesn't invite any further gimmickry. The focus play and tight editing also make for excellent cast credits at the end.

The end credits also provide one of the two negatives. After the cast are introduced so capably, there's no need for the further footage that includes a solitary blooper, a brief glimpse behind the scenes and gratuitous play with Bandit, the boykin from Boykin. With its strong pace and enigmatic glimpse into a bigger story, Catch the Frog deserves to be a quick jab of a short film, but this extraneous material is more like a distracting hug. The other is half of a positive. We're treated to a number of good locations, as we should be in any action film, and one of them is a covered bridge over an interstate, in which we witness a fight. The choreography by Matthew Crosby is solid, but neither Amber Michelle nor Michael Coleman are able to sell the moves, which lets some power back out of the picture. If this was as much experimentation as challenge submission, that's the one piece that still needs work. All the rest could easily be put to solid use in a future Running Wild feature.

Catch the Frog can be viewed for free at Vimeo or YouTube.

Ritz & Spitz (2013)

Director: Kirby Ann Witte
Stars: Terence Taggart, James Lawrence Sicard, Kelly O'Keefe and Batman

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.

While any film reviewed after SuperFuzz is going to find itself inevitably lacking in comparison, Ritz & Spitz is an intriguing short on its own merits. It's another comedy, though this one's live action (albeit with digital manipulations) and it runs three times as long. Like SuperFuzz, it avoids speech, except for one carefully placed word in the tradition of Silent Movie, but uses other sounds and even unintelligible dialogue for effect. This plays it more traditionally though, as it's also shot in black and white and it adds a score. The crisp visuals also make it feel a lot more modern than an old silent film, even with the focus being on a pair of magicians who fit the vaudeville era well. I wonder how this would have played as an homage to the longer, story based pieces that cinemagician Georges Méliès made a few years into the twentieth century. It would have needed suitable aging effects and a few more intertitles than it has, but that approach may have given it a little more oomph than it has.

Ritz and Spitz are stage magicians, but they're very different. Ritz lives up to his name, being slick and assured in his top hat, bow tie and cape. Terence Taggert has the flamboyant gestures down and looks like he inspires the confidence that the audience apparently has in him. How could a magician fail with a moustache like that? Spitz, on the other hand, can't hold a candle to him and probably couldn't afford one anyway if it wasn't a prop. He's a fundamentally lower class equivalent, appearing like nothing less than a scarecrow in ragged clothes, with tricks that are just as lacking. As Spitz, James Lawrence Sicard is embarrassed to be on the same stage as Ritz, but that could all be a deliberate contrast for a double act. Initially the script serves only to highlight their differences, Spitz sabotaging Ritz's tricks and failing in his own, while the effects are cheats; we don't even see Ritz slicing a watermelon in half with a sword to set up a trick. It's not long though before the real magic begins, as things start to get neatly surreal.

It's the surreality that makes this one work. While what we see could easily be read as a well rehearsed double act, it may just be that everything really does go off the rails in a maelstrom of catastrophe. I'm not sure which it's supposed to be, but it's not really important. What makes it so watchable is how far off the rails it ventures and how Ritz & Spitz attempt to salvage it. Surely it's no mistake that the chaos follows a white rabbit, which Ritz pulls out of his hat but Spitz loses inside his. Without this journey into the rabbit hole of surreality, it wouldn't have found Wonderland and would have ended up too long, too slow and too unlike the silent film it half wants to be. It does drag during the first half but the cinematic trickery gets better and better and the story gets wilder and wilder. The wilder it gets, the better it gets and the second half makes up for the first. At least David Kelly's score keeps us interested while we get there. As a sixteen minute short it's fun, but edited down into a twelve minute short it might be better.

SuperFuzz (2013)

Director: David Towles-Moore

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.

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in Phoenix in 2013. Here's an index to my reviews of 2013 films.

I've already reviewed a couple of short films (A Stray and The Worst Best Man) that will be screening at Filmstock Arizona 2013 in early December, but I plan on reviewing the rest too. I ought to start with the pair I saw back in October at Filmstock in the Park, a free public event at the Downtown Phoenix Civic Space. I saw a few notable films that night but the most memorable had to be SuperFuzz, an animation without dialogue from filmmaker David Towles-Moore. It's an energetic affair, to put it mildly, a surreal one and a highly accessible one. It has such universal appeal that I'd be hard put to imagine anyone it wouldn't play well to, which makes its many festival wins unsurprising. It landed awards at Filmstock Colorado, so is now happily circulating round this revolving film festival that travels the four corner states: Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. If it was eligible for prizes at the others, it would no doubt win them. It's hard to say no to a black ninja fighting a psychotic teddy bear.

Yeah, you heard that right. The ninja is Gray and he likes nothing more than relaxing after a hard day's work with some Super Co Chocolate Milk. Given that he's a ninja, you wouldn't think he'd have much of a hardship drinking milk from his fridge, but you don't know about Sevelle yet. That's his teddy bear, a cute and cuddly little critter some of the time and, well, a psychotic and metamorphic beast whenever he gets near some Super Co Chocolate Milk. What are the odds? So Gray has to sneak into his very own apartment, unlock the secret compartment in his fridge and spirit the milk away before Sevelle decides to steal it from him in the form of the clearly insane Mr Fudgems with his own, not inconsiderable, ninja skills. Five minutes later, the end. If that's not a synopsis for the greatest action film ever, I don't know what is. Well, OK, a ninety minute version that never stops being inventive would trump it. It would also succeed The Raid: Redemption as the closest thing to the xkcd ultimate action movie.

Animating the story means that Towles-Moore didn't have to find someone at Arizona State University like Iko Uwais or Tony Jaa to bring it to life. He could do that himself and he did, filling many crew slots all on his own, though with the assistance of a number of others where needed. Everything is pristine but especially worthy of note are his choreography and his sound. I think he uses every part of Gray's apartment in their epic battle, without stretching, and there's hardly a repeated move. Every sound is joyous and there are a succession of them; so many noises without a single word, gradually clustering together as the action builds until they're layered. He also makes room for great little moments, like a perfectly timed squeak. Sure, it's not the most original storyline that ever hit the screen, given that it's basically Clouseau vs Cato, albeit where Clouseau is a frickin' ninja and Cato is a frickin' metamorphic demonic teddy bear, but who cares? It's five minutes of magic. Even the credits are perfect.

Oh, and I may be accidentally timing this perfectly. Happy birthday, David Towles-Moore!

4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker (2012)

Directors: Mike Campbell & Todd Johnson
Stars: Katherine Browning, Leah Verrill, Mike Campbell, Ashley Love, Tiffany S Walker and Bianca Lopez

I first saw the film now known as 4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker, as a festival submission when it was still called The Rental. Now, The Rental is hardly a snappy title but at least it doesn't give away, count them, two separate spoilers. What are the odds that this picture is going to feature four girls who are killed by a soul taker? Honestly, this could be the most spoilerific title ever, a full idiotic step beyond John Dies at the End. I remembered The Rental, though not its title, but couldn't remember much more about it than what is given away with the replacement name. It was one of those films that was capable enough to eat up an hour and a half without overt complaints but not memorable enough to stand out from the crowd, something that, by definition, every festival submission really needs to do. It was a bundle of hot chicks, death scenes and plot conveniences, meaning that it'll work well enough in the wild but be forgotten in no time unless a cast member suddenly makes it huge. None have yet.

At least the prologue is clichéd enough to dissuade more discerning viewers from proceeding further. It is so quintessentially clichéd that for a while I was honestly waiting for someone to shout, 'Cut!' and let us in on the secret that this is a horror movie within a horror movie. Unfortunately it doesn't; it keeps on going until we realise that we're seeing a template for the next ninety minutes. I literally can't spoil this picture, as there is nothing here that isn't a given from the new title and the first five minutes in which Becky is chased slowly around a small house by Roger Corman in an Emperor Palpatine costume. She's in full on victim mode, so far into hysterics that she's obviously going to be killed off quickly. He's calm and confident, issuing unending clichés. 'You leave me no choice, Becky,' he warns her, while trying to keep a straight face. 'I can do this all night, he mutters, 'but I prefer not to.' Given that he's played by Mike Campbell, one of the two directors, he doesn't have a choice. 'Give me your soul,' he whispers.

After the title, we discover that he's Devlin Chito and he's the landlord who is about to let the very same house to a quartet of stereotypical giggling young ladies. Well, four stereotypical giggling young ladies who are clearly a little older than they should be but still look good. Two are polar opposites: Lily is as pure and virginal as her flowery name would suggest, while Bianca is happy to bed anything with a penis. In fact, she even has her very own silent hunk to haul in her stuff. That leaves Lori and Pam, who are a lesbian couple; Lori is the blonde, Pam the brunette. Lily is the inevitable link between the four, as Lori's sister and Bianca's schoolfriend. I can buy the former but not the latter. Lily and Lori could easily be sisters who reacted differently to heavily disapproving parents, but Lily and Bianca clearly aren't the same age. The only things they agree on are that they love the house and that Devlin is a creepy dude. 'There's something not right about that guy,' says Pam as he vanishes into a puff of smoke outside.

And so the quartet settle into the house and their stereotypes, which only hint at going beyond sexual preferences. Bianca may be a nymphomaniac but she also freely and knowingly uses her body in order to get men to do anything she wants. Lori and Pam are a cute couple, though Pam has a bitchy streak, perhaps because however intolerant Lori's parents are, we discover Pam can't ever go home. They're believable together, playfighting with popcorn and cushions before jumping in the sack, then pissing each other off the next day; Pam flirts outrageously with Bianca, who isn't remotely interested, all to make her own girl jealous. Lily is the counter to all of them, because she isn't just waiting for the right man, she appears to be icked out by the concept of bodily fluids, not just sex but even drinking out of the same glass as someone else. She also prays for the others as they sit down to eat dinner. It's odd that she be the one to show her bits first; Lori and Pam don't even take off their bras to make love.

As if we might get the idea that there's some social value in the story, we're given our first outrageous plot convenience just before half an hour in. These girls are all in college, which isn't much of a surprise, but the first evidence of that is when Lori does her homework on mythology that just happens to be all about Choctaw shadow beings, starting with Nalusa Chito, best known as the soul eater. 'That's pretty weird,' says Lily. 'Mr Chito's last name means soul eater.' Well, 'chito' merely means 'spirit', but let's not quibble. We're here to learn exactly what the landlord, who has been watching the girls throughout on camera, is up to. Apparently the soul eater gets its strength from the souls of evil women, suggesting that in enticing ladies to his house and killing them, Mr Chito is merely recharging his batteries. 'Only the death of the innocent renders it powerless,' Lori reads, so we know where the story is going. Lori's question of, 'What is good and what is evil?' is the only real substance to the story.

The unusual thing is that this question manifests itself mostly through the gay subtext to the story, an obvious thing from the outset but one that builds through the first half. Every powerful moment ties to this aspect of the story. We're given a closed environment with four girls, in which the traditional good girl is the outsider. Her sister is gay but devoted and looking at marriage, if it ever becomes legal, while her best friend is straight but overtly uses sex as a weapon. Lily finds that, while she's all family values in her own mind, she can't help but see Lori as good, if fundamentally flawed according to her morality, but Bianca as bad. It's not who you do it with, it's why you do it, almost a manifesto for gay rights. Also, Lori and Pam's relationship is the only real one here, as Lily doesn't have them and Bianca doesn't have real ones. Yet it's framed just like any relationship, with tender, loving moments and tougher ones that ask questions about sincerity. It just so happens that both halves of the couple are girls.

I hadn't realised after my first viewing quite how well constructed this half of the movie is, but it's surely why it got picked up by Breaking Glass Pictures, whose dominant programming strand is LBGT movies. Certainly it's far more substantial than the horror side of the story, which hardly gets much attention at all. That side is thrust emphatically to the fore at the halfway point, where the film morphs into a weird creature without any real focus. It's a slasher movie, but one confined in a particularly enclosed space where there's no doubt who the particularly invulnerable slasher is and why he's doing what he's doing. It's a suspense flick, but it was clear from the first five minutes where everything was going to end up. It's drama, as tensions arise between characters, but none are remotely believable. It's even a torture porn movie, as Mr Chito turns into a sort of manipulative Jigsaw character, but it's a torture porn movie without any real torture porn. Really, as a horror movie, it succeeds only in eviscerating itself.

The actors do a surprisingly good job, given the material and given that none have racked up much in the way of credits. Katherine Browning is most prominent as Lily and she screams pretty well, but this was only her second feature, after the thoroughly awful The Carpenter: Part 1 - And So They Die. This was the first substantial role for Tiffany Walker, who plays Bianca, but she does fine. Ashley Love does better as Lori, who has a feature and a couple of shorts behind her. Leah Verrill gets lots of opportunity as Pam, with her bitchy attitude, and she lives up to it, though she does go overboard on occasion. And that's about it. The only other substantial role belongs to Mike Campbell, who does well at being creepy but not so well at being anything else. His role consists of standing still and speaking in an infuriatingly calm monotone with a grin on his face that makes him appear less like a Choctaw shadow dweller and more like a paedophile priest. 'Another evil gone,' he recites at one point, but without depth.

4 Dead Girls: The Soul Taker isn't getting good reviews, though Greg Goodsell's at Cinema Head Cheese (currently also the only one at IMDb) is hilarious. Unfortunately it isn't really getting reviews, period. It's being consistently ignored, it seems, which is sad because I want to see what other people thought of it and its rather strange approach to horror. It asks a good fundamental question, that time honoured one about good and evil but, even as it does so, it promptly forgets that it might want to hazard an answer. In the end, we're returned to it as we close in on the end credits, but by that point, we really don't care because we've been led down so many clichéd horror tropes that we forget that there was even a hint of a wink at a possibility of some substance. Really what we're left with is that gay subtext that played out strongly and capably for half a picture. If this had been a drama instead of a horror movie, it might have been a lot more enjoyable. As it is, it's merely watchable at best.

The Lights (2013)

Director: J Andy Moreno
Stars: Andriy Ivanov, Dietrich Hodge and Zein Moreno

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.

I was honoured to be asked to serve as a judge for the IFP Phoenix Mystery Box Challenge and I had a blast making my choices and seeing them count. Some of my picks won out while others got outvoted by my peers, who preferred other entries. One that other judges rated consistently higher than me was The Lights, an admittedly intriguing piece by J Andy Moreno, who had made one of my favourite Beat the Clock challenge films this year, Doubting Thomas. However I had many problems with this, which landed third place amongst twenty entries, not least that it doesn't tell a complete story, setting us up but leaving us with a 'to be continued' note at the end. It aimed for feel over detail but I had problems with some of the details, like the cop with a mohawk who acted well but looked wrong. The acting was inconsistent, Andriy Ivanov strong on the street but less so while being interrogated, as he is to begin and end the film. I'm still not sure exactly what the interrogation means either, so it's all ungrounded.

To be fair, there was much that I liked too, especially on the technical side and I'm not surprised that it won for Best Technical Elements. I liked how Det Terry Janks, the lead, and Agent Andrea Carmen, the lady asking the questions, are initially faceless because of a careful lighting choice. I liked the back and forth between the questions and the flashbacks that partly explain why they're being asked. When we get to the point where Janks discovers why the film has this title, during the investigation of a storage locker belonging to a missing mechanical engineer, the effects are solid, rendering the set particularly claustrophobic. I also liked the monologue delivered by Zein Moreno but it doesn't wrap up the story, it just wraps up the episode. This feels far less like a complete film and more like the introductory part to a web series that may well get much more interesting as it progresses. As a jigsaw piece it's intriguing but unfulfilling; as a big picture it may well be something to see.

The Lights can be watched for free at Vimeo.

The Prescription (2013)

Director: Sarah Woodward
Stars: Eric Storie and Corina Smith

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.

Director Sarah Woodward and her Untrained Slackers rounded out the last IFP Phoenix film challenge screening with a enjoyably surreal drama centered around a young couple. That was the Beat the Clock challenge and, as if the intervening four months hadn't happened, they would have got to kick off the current one, the Mystery Box challenge, had the programme not been inadvertently changed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's an enjoyably surreal drama centered around a young couple. The key difference is that where the lead couple are confronted with an embarrassing family in It's All Relative, they become the embarrassing family in The Prescription. Another is that each of those embarrassing family members attempted to steal the show from the leads in the last film, Eric Storie clearly succeeding, but here it's the leads who steal the show from everyone else so completely that it's surprising to see sixteen other names in the credits. Eric Storie is one of the leads this time and, frankly, he steals the show from his co-star Corina Smith, who is perhaps even better but less flamboyant.

They're a young couple who are apparently seriously not getting on. As the story begins, he's slamming the door and she's yelling after him. 'You will never last a day in my shoes,' she exclaims. Of course he gets to find out, because she somehow causes them both to change sex, apparently through the online prescription of Dr Mansbach. Storie makes for a bulky and rather awkward woman, especially in high heels, but then I've seen less coordinated women; Corina Smith becomes a dapper man in a suit and tie and with a neat moustache. Off they go to experience life as a member of the opposite sex, discovering the better and the worse as they live similar days separately, and ending up with the merely different. The message is clear and the ending obvious but we have a lot of fun getting there. The best moment belongs to Smith, who provides a gloriously off comment to a little girl on a bench, but Storie plays it up like he's Jim Carrey in drag. I'm looking forward to more of what the Untrained Slackers will get up to.

An American Ghost Story (2012)

Director: Derek Cole
Star: Stephen Twardokus

When any genre starts doing really well at the box office, it's never surprising to see a whole rash of low budget knockoffs following in its wake. Paranormal movies are no exception, but they were hardly high budget to begin with. The Blair Witch Project cost $22,500, which meant that the quarter of a million it grossed ensured it a place in the record books. Paranormal Activity is catching up to that mark from an even lower budget; it cost a mere $15,000. While An American Ghost Story is a little more traditional in its avoidance of found footage and shakycam, following an approach that dates back at least as far as The Amityville Horror and is doing well once again with pictures like The Conjuring, its meagre $10,000 budget doesn't sound particularly small in comparison. The faux iconic cash-in title doesn't help either, presumably aiming to catch fans from American Horror Story rather than An American Haunting, which bombed horribly; the film's original title of Revenant is better and more appropriate.

It plays pretty well from the outset, as Paul begins recording notes on the haunted house he's moving into, even while surrounded by moving boxes. 'Day one in the Browning house,' he states. 'No activity thus far.' He's here because he aims to write a book about supernatural phenomena and the best way he can come up with to make it viable is to rent a supposedly haunted house and get the experience first hand. It makes sense, in a twisted way, but it does lead to a host of the sort of moments in which we cringe at the stupidity of characters in horror movies. 'All right, house!' he dares it in a particularly good example. 'Show me what you got.' Like that's ever going to end well? That's what he wants. The freakiness of the approach soon makes itself apparent when his girlfriend Stella arrives. The first thing he does is show her old photos of the house and the family who lived and died there in a mass murder suicide, then asks her to decorate the little boy's room like the photo to make the spirits more active.

Stella clearly isn't sold on the whole concept, but Paul is blind enough not to notice how unhappy she is from the very beginning. 'It's horrible to think they all died in here,' is her immediate response and she gets less enthusiastic from there. 'Can't we just enjoy our first night together?' she asks, but she can't even distract him with mild seduction attempts. He's eager to get down to work, while she's reluctant, clearly hoping that nothing whatsoever happens but just as clearly fearing that it will. He's consistently and calmly persevering, which is cute but an active buzz killer, both to us and to his girlfriend, who's a second thought in his mind behind the potential of the place throughout. When his friend Sam arrives the next day, almost his first words are to ask if Stella has left him yet, because the eventuality is that obvious. At least Paul's calmness is refreshing, this playing sincerely, without any of the camp idiocy of the usual college kids or the dumbness of ghost hunters out of their depth.

For a microbudget picture, this works pretty well for a while, especially given how few people made the film happen. The cast is small, numbering a mere half a dozen and for long stretches it's just Paul; the crew is similarly tiny, with many cast members doubling or tripling up roles behind the camera. Stephen Twardokus is a capable lead; Paul is too driven for us to really care about him but, given that limitation, I appreciated his performance more than I expected. He also wrote the script, co-edited it and was one of three producers. The other two are Jon Gale, who cast the movie and played Paul's landlord Skip, and Derek Cole, who's all over the credits like a rash: he directed it, shot it and co-edited it. What's more, he also provided the most important prop, the house, which is really his own home and which was lived in at the time. All the night scenes were shot silently because his wife and kids were busy doing whatever they felt like doing in the other rooms at the time.

I liked the traditional approaches that these filmmakers took. They avoided the easy shakycam option and shot this capably and professionally. It's certainly no art film, but the cinematography is surprising in its effectiveness. The effects are also well done, even though they avoided CGI and overt gimmickry. Their simple nature was refreshing but also often underwhelming in the face of inevitable comparisons with the usually CGI assisted shocks of other paranormal movies. The lofi nature of the effects doesn't help the film move on either, especially as they don't begin until twenty minutes in. A strong downside is that it's a very deliberate, often slow, film and it does drag at points. H Anton Riehl's piano score both helps and hinders, as it's low and slow and plays to that pace. I liked the creepy feel, which reminded of the Tori Amos cover of Slayer's Raining Blood, but it's never able to perk up the pace. When that works, the score helps it work; but when it starts to drag, well, the music helps it do that too.

The most important moment for me was when Stella left. I knew she would from her first couple of lines and everything she said underlined it, but it still happened a lot sooner than I expected. Liesel Kopp got second billing in what was fairly the second most substantial role, but her leaving so soon made it so obvious that it was all about Paul that I reevaluated what was going on. And what's going on is that An American Ghost Story isn't a paranormal horror movie, not really; it's a character study of a driven man who just happens to choose this subject for the book he wants to write. If we choose to watch this as a horror movie, it works but barely; the shocks are decent but not unexpected and there's nothing to see here that we haven't seen many times before. However, if we choose to watch it as a drama about Paul, it works much better. It's about the clash between what he wants to have done with his life and what he eventually finds he's capable of, along with the risks he takes to find out.

The setup for this side of the picture arrives a quarter of an hour in. When Sam asks Paul about all the clippings he's put up on the wall about the murder suicide, he affirms that he really believes in all this stuff. He's naïve, of course, and he has apparently no background in the paranormal, but he believes and he believes that believing is all that matters. Every approach he takes is because he believes it's what he's supposed to do, not because he knows it'll work. There's something driving him and we find out what it is that night as he talks with Stella in bed. He's thirty and he hasn't done anything with his life, so he's acutely feeling his age. 'I want to prove to myself that I can actually finish something that I start,' he confesses to her. The final piece is when he suggests that Sam needs a girlfriend who'll take care of him like his mum did, as he's subconsciously stating that he needs that too. If that isn't Stella, it certainly isn't the gap she leaves when she moves out. He's presaging his own doom.

And so, for all the trappings of a paranormal horror movie, all the expected genre conventions and the inevitable shock moments, we're watching Paul not the ghosts of the Browning family under the sheets that covered them when the cops found them. Even the more effective ones are as much about Paul as they are about the paranormal (the best is a double whammy built from an incredibly simple scene of him looking under a bed) because we're never required to share his belief. We can simply buy into his conviction that he has to achieve something and his willingness to jeopardise everything he has to get there, including the very person he claims to be doing it for. 'I want to be somebody you can be proud of,' he tells Stella in that early scene, before she inevitably disappears from the story and he fails to see that his reason for doing this has gone with her. Stephen Twardokus does a good job at portraying Paul as a man only half realising that and perhaps driving himself crazy in the process.

I liked An American Ghost Story for this exploration of a man attempting to do the one thing that might give his life meaning, only to find that it may be an impossible task, yet continuing on regardless. As a horror movie I found it only fair, though it does punch far above its weight given the slight budget. Many of its aspects played out depending on which reading we take. For instance, it gets very dark, literally, because of how Paul utilises lighting. From a horror standpoint, that might aim to make it more spooky but really it just makes it more dark. As a metaphor, it plays much better as a mirror of Paul's perhaps irreversible journey into darkness. What you get out of this may eventually depend on what you expect from it. Expect The Conjuring and you aren't going to be impressed. Expect a modern take on Heart of Darkness and you might get something out of it, with its journey into a man's soul where he finds 'the horror, the horror' at its end dressed up in a modern paranormal framework.