Escape (2010)

Director: Andrés Rosende
Stars: Lydia Aquino, Alfred De Quesada, Berto Colón and Ivana Horonic

This film was an official selection at the 7th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

Escape, a capably made picture from a company called WIT or Whatever It Takes, is one of those films that is weighed down by its metaphor and its message. With no background for us to explore to find a moral compass, we're given two sets of people who must therefore be seen as good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are the ones driving around at night in pickup trucks with bright searchlights to help them shoot the good guys with crossbows. The good guys are the ones running as fast as they can to remain alive. Well, maybe not alive, but in one piece at least. There are two other clear observations that we can't fail to make from the opening minute and one of them is that the good guys are fanged. Usually, vampires avoiding the rising sun aren't the good guys, but we can vaguely buy it here because, hey, at least they don't sparkle. The other observation is that these vampires are Latinos who speak Spanish, while the hunters are Caucasian and speak English. Here's where the metaphor jumps in to say hi.

This short film isn't badly written but it struggles with this metaphor because it refuses to allow us to delve any deeper than the surface. We're effectively told to trust the angle from which the story is told and there's nothing here that allows us to deviate from that without acquiring a vaguely guilty feeling about doing so; it's never good for a message movie to play for guilt because it can backfire so easily. Fortunately Lydia Aquino, the lead actress, gets a story arc that almost makes up for it. She's a Latino vampire called Alicia, who makes it safely to to a building with Guillermo, her significant other of some description. Already there is Martin, who is doing as well as can be imagined with a couple of arrows in him. They spend their time bemoaning their lot and arguing about what they should do next, until their pursuers catch up with them and it all becomes real again. Guillermo wants to leave the country; Alicia sees it as their home and refuses to yield to oppression. You can see where this metaphor is going.

It never really comes out to state that cornered vampires tearing the throats out of people with stakes is somehow morally equivalent to illegal immigrants taking a stand against racism, but it does feel like that's what Andrés Rosende, the director and co-writer, took here. It all works much better as a drama than a message. It's good to see Spanish speaking vampires in an American film, as it's been rare even with an early start like 1931's Drácula, Universal's Spanish language version with Carlos Villarías as the Count, shot at night on the same sets that Béla Lugosi was shooting on during the day. The differences in Alicia's and Guillermo's reactions to these circumstances are explored well and Alicia's character has a fairly believable progression within a short amount of time. With the metaphor toned way down, this could play well as the beginning of a feature, one where the opening credits and title screen arrive as this ends, to be followed by a bigger, better story, which would bring needed background and depth.

Cell Phone Psycho (2010)

Director: David S White
Star: Billy Slaughter

This film was an official selection at the 7th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

I can't argue too much with a picture made by a production company named Evil Penguin Films. That's awesome and their logo is just as cool. If this surreal homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, made in the form of a public service announcement, is anything to go by, they're surely fun people to hang with. I'd say that even before seeing their other short on Vimeo, Marigny Bywater Ladies Tea Auxiliary Sunday Demolition Society, which surely confirms it. Cell Phone Psycho is another of those shorts designed to kick off short film selections at film festivals. I'm sure that's where the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival would have put it too, if only Zombiefication hadn't landed the slot first. There can be only one, right? Well, this one's versatile enough, and short enough at only three and a half minutes, to meet the need and it even ends with a neat breaking of the fourth wall that would warrant a smile even on the hundredth viewing. If it lost thirty seconds more in the middle, it would be blissful.

The star is Billy Slaughter, an unfortunate name for an actor given the circumstances. The concept is to have him watch a movie in a theatre, while simultaneously doing all the things that we all hate people doing when they're watching movies in theatres. You know, like leaving his mobile phone on, answering it during the movie and chatting through the whole thing. He throws out spoilers and even has the gall to tell his fellow moviegoers to shh. To emphasise that this is a PSA, there are text overlays to show us where we're going, but they need to combine with the title to really highlight where we're really going. It's the shower scene, of course, because 'WE WILL FIND YOU' and the Evil Penguin folk do so in surreal magnificence. Movie fans will deconstruct this scene in their heads to check off all the shots that mimic the original, subverted neatly of course, and probably miss what else is on show. That's why theatres should play this before every screening, so we can catch it all through repetition.

I'm not sure precisely what the rest of the cast are supposed to be, beyond people who find people who run through the litany of movie faux pas. The credits call them the Noisician Coalition and their website describes them as 'a loosely confederated alliance of very loud people, including, but not limited to, The Krewe of Joyful Noise, The Buttonmen, The Big NONO, The Spasmodic Marching All-Stars, Vermillion Lies and other shadowy organizations about whom little, if anything, is known.' They're what New Orleans is all about and they must liven up those 430 party days a year that they celebrate in the Big Easy. Their costumes are awesome, an unholy hybrid of marching band, steampunk and Día de los Muertos, along with half a dozen other fashion trends neatly subverted into something wildly original. They should be cloned and paid to accompany this PSA before every screening at every theatre in the country. It won't be tough. They're from New Orleans; we can pay them in beads, right?

Cell Phone Psycho can be watched for free at Vimeo.

Red Umbrella (2010)

Directors: Andri Cung and Edward Gunawan
Stars: Atiqah Hasiholan, Rio Dewanto and Zubir Mustaqim

This film was an official selection at the 7th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

The most obvious flaw that Red Umbrella has is that it's entirely predictable to anyone who's watched more than a couple of Asian horror movies. To be fair, it's probably entirely predictable to anyone else watching too, but fortunately it's constructed with panache, so it's little hardship to watch through the story one more time. It's also played out entirely as a drama without a single effect. While judicious use of an effect or two might have enhanced the film technically, it would have rendered it even more of a cliché. Playing it straight and keeping it down to ten minutes means that it becomes something like the taxi ride we see: safe and reliable. It shows up in the middle of a horror shorts selection, something that could easily be equated to the bad side of town, draws us in until we realise where we're going, lets us out safely at the end with a decent memory of the ride, then stays with us, at least for a little while, to fade away into the graveyard of memories until another film comes along with the same story.

We know we're in Indonesia because the sign on the top of Mohammad Raza's vehicle reads 'TAKSI' not 'TAXI'; I think every Indonesian movie I've seen features a taksi in it somewhere. He's nearing the end of his shift, clearly knackered, and his wife is pressuring him by phone to come home. On his way through Cawang, though, he stops for a young lady who flags him down in the dark. She's under a red umbrella, even though it isn't raining out, and something tells him to take her home to Bintaro, even though it's not on his way. They talk about the usual things, like whether she has a boyfriend and how dangerous it is for young ladies to wait for a taksi alone in bad neighbourhoods like Cawang. Even if she's not worried about local hoodlums, what about ghosts? And on we go until we get to Bintaro, which frankly doesn't look any more safe than Cawang, and we're given, along with Raza, the explanation of the story that we figured out long ago merely by reading between the lines.

I liked the story of Payung Merah or Red Umbrella, even though it offered no surprises. Most movies that tell an oft retold story are annoying precisely because they're so familiar, but this one feels more like an old friend stopped by for ten minutes. Perhaps it's because Atiqah Hasiholan is so inherently likeable as the girl with the red umbrella, or because Rio Dewanto manages to find his character so capably and so immediately. If she's the sort of customer taksi drivers want to pick up, he's the sort of ride girls want to flag down. The camera is hardly ambitious, given that almost the entire piece takes place inside a taksi on the road, but it picks up a lot of colour; we absorb the neighbourhood's flavour through its reflection in Raza's face. There's little opportunity for anything clever, the story kept moving along through some efficient editing and through Dewanto's voice. We become his passengers too, tired but comfortable, in an agreeable state because of his chatter, patiently listening to an old story told yet again.

Bugbaby (2010)

Director: Rebecca Lorenne
Stars: Lara Fisher, Jared Martzell, Mink Stole

This film was an official selection at the 7th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

It's utterly obvious that co-producers Rebecca Lorenne (who also directed) and Dan Spurgeon (who also wrote the script) are fans of John Waters. Casting Mink Stole as a busybody adoption agency prude is a giveaway, but the darkly comedic tone, kitsch fifties Americana setting and 'adventurous' approach to mass murder are quintessential Waters too. Add in throwaway references to flipper babies, Communism and dialogue such as, 'People like you make me sick!' and you might be surprised to see anyone else's name on Bugbaby. However, Waters isn't the only influence; Peter Jackson's Braindead is another film that springs to mind. It was set in the same era, albeit on the other side of the world from Baltimore, in which most Waters pictures are set, but simultaneously being far more polite and far more bloody. The title character, the mostly unseen MacGuffin of the piece, is Samson, a six week old baby who reminded me in many ways of Selwyn, the bizarre zombie baby in Braindead.

Whatever their influences, Lorenne and Spurgeon conjured up a delicious slice of fifties apple pie with a thoroughly average couple whose baby is anything but. We discover that fact before the the memorable title reaches the screen in just as memorable a fashion, captured with great timing right before six week old Sammy grabs Mrs Johnson's cat as a pre-dinner snack. There are plenty of hints here as to how odd Sammy is, hints which continue throughout the movie even though the title gives it all away. He's less of a baby and more of a bug. His parents, the Gregorys, aren't even convinced he's human, though Mrs Tottifot from the adoption agency, has a lot more tolerance (or blind devotion to all children). They've invited her over because things are getting a little out of hand, but of course we ain't seen nothin' yet. Out of hand is a mild euphemism for where things end up, in delightfully horrible fashion. If Mink Stole says, 'It's positively disgusting!' you just know that it's going to be hilariously wrong.

Bugbaby won the Best Horror Short award at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, though it's not as strong as that might suggest. It was a weaker year for horror shorts, though conversely it was a strong one indeed for horror features. The chief joys are in the setting, which gets increasingly surreal, and in the dialogue, which remains blissfully happy throughout, regardless what calamities descend on the Gregory house. These are well fleshed out, the pastel colours and little background details a solid grounding for the insanity that erupts. However we don't see much of Sammy, just hints here and there with a few Sammycam shots from his compound eyes, and there's only a modicum of mangling. Would a few gallons of gore have hurt the film? I doubt it, especially with filmmakers this capable to put them to good use. I also wanted to know what happened next. There's surely a full feature in the next ninety minutes, but it has to play out in our head. We can fever dream, right?

Cold Sore (2010)

Director: Matt Bird
Stars: Saskia Burmeister, Henry Nixon and Peter McAllum

This film was an official selection at the 7th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

Another Aussie movie, Cold Sore is more consistent than I Rot, it has a more agreeably off feel and it's more likely to stay with you. Then again, this was one of the films I saw a couple of times back in 2011 but, less than three years later, I couldn't quite remember how it went until it got there. It's the story of a boy and a girl who meet at a party and the cold sores that both acquire there during a brief snogging session. She's Jenna, who sits on her own, looking completely out of place; he's Guy, who has a lot more confidence, so hones in on her in a neat piece of cinematography. She points out that she's waiting for someone; he adds that he's been stood up by a friend. And so he buys a couple of mojitos, which I now realise were always everywhere in movies and I just didn't realise it until I saw Burn Notice, and they're all set for a night of it. What doesn't happen is what we might expect, because Guy bails on her after a friend calls him at the party. That's a little odd but hey, maybe he's taking it slow... no, it's a little odd.

What does happen is the title. Jenna wakes up in the morning, next to a mostly empty glass of wine and someone else's name badge, with a cold sore on her top lip. We know that this is going to have some serious meaning and Jenna seems to think so too, going to the doctor to have tests run. Perhaps she's just overly sensitive to anything medical, given that she has some weird scars on her body and there's a wheelchair in her apartment. Guy rings, of course, and she puts him off until Friday, to give it a chance to heal up, but when he arrives, he has one too. Dr Darvas rings with the results at a most inappropriate moment, but it's the results themselves that explain where we're going. Or at least we think so. The end of Cold Sore is a neatly powerful one that benefits from the slow buildup and hints at misdirection. This is one of those scenarios that might just invade our dreams and turn them into nightmares because it's never overt, it moves gradually like a creeping thing into our minds where it eventually festers cleverly.

I liked the performances by Saskia Burmeister and Henry Nixon, as well as Jared Underwood's capable score which draws them along. I'm less impressed by the film's pacing; while the dénouement deserves a slow build to deliver its shivers, what it gets isn't as consistently grown as it could have been. I wished less that the film would have been shorter (at eighteen minutes, it's a longer piece than usually makes it into horror shorts selections at the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival) and more that the first fifteen would have built more emphatically. As it is, there are a few slow points where little happens and which could have been harnessed to build the tone; perhaps writer/director Matt Bird intended them to. He's aware that the tone is the film's bedrock, but I wanted it to be heightened far more dramatically, through a stronger sound design or a quirkier visual aesthetic, something notable to haul Cold Sore out of the everyday before it lets us in on its odd little secret. I liked this film but it could have been more.

Last Seen on Dolores Street (2010)

Directrix: Devi Snively
Stars: Cynthia Dane, Roxie Schaller, Circus-Szalewski, Eileen Grubba, Ken Dusek Jr and Max Roush

This film was an official selection at the 7th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

I enjoyed Devi Snively's 2011 horror comedy Trippin' and was delighted to see a quote from my review on the cover of the 2-disc DVD set alongside another from the indefatigable Jim McLennan, the scholar and gentleman behind Trash City. I was even more impressed by Snively herself, who came out with her cast for the Trippin' screening at Fear Fest 3. Beyond being a clearly capable film director, surely a good thing given that she now teaches the subject, she's a thoroughly grounded one, as professional a young lady as I've met. I'm not sure why it took me this long to catch up with one of her short films, as it's just as solid, albeit not very long. I mean, sure, it's a short film, but it's a really short short film, running only just over three and a half minutes, including credits; yet it never feels rushed. It's a twist movie, as so many short shorts are, and there's not much time to do anything except set up the story and then hit us with the twist. Luckily for us, Snively and her crew do both really well.

Not a shot is wasted, with some gorgeous composition of frame, much of it reminiscent of old films noir, even though it's shot in colour. The old time feel is enhanced by the fact that there's only a single line of dialogue throughout the entire picture. 'Do you have anybody?' the vet asks our unnamed leading lady, after he puts her dog to sleep. She's credited as Cyn and we can see from her tag that the dog's name is Eileen, as is the lady whose face adorns the missing poster outside the vet's surgery. The lowlife who follows Cyn as she walks off into the night is Kenny and... well, you'll need to watch the film to figure out where everything goes. I mention all the names because they're also the names of the actors who flesh out the roles. Cyn is played by Cynthia Dane and Kenny by Ken Dusek Jr. Even the vet, Dr Szalewski, is played by Circus-Szalewski. The reason is that it's apparently a very personal film for Snively, who spent a year in Los Angeles and apparently didn't have a particularly great time of it.

In interviews she has said that she 'got mired amidst the bottom feeders and carelessly lost my soul', a viable synopsis for a film noir if ever I've heard one. She adds that 'luckily it grew back,' but for a while, long enough to shoot this film at least, she clearly felt like she was one of the myriad victims of forties cinema. Fortunately she dreamed of being the femme fatale, so this story grew out of her experiences and into a cute and hopefully cathartic little short. It was received well, playing a whole string of horror festivals, including the International Horror & Sci-Fi Festival here in Phoenix in 2011. Visiting it now tells me that I've waited far too long to catch up with Snively's short work and suggests that I should get on with it and track them down. At least that shouldn't be much of a chore, given that this film, along with six others, which include such gloriously titled shorts as Confederate Zombie Massacre and I Spit on Eli Roth, are on disc two of that DVD set. You know, the one with an Apocalypse Later quote on the front.

I Rot (2010)

Director: Josef J Weber
Stars: Terry Rogers, Georgii Speakman, Adam Tuominen, Kate Englefield and James Edwards

This film was an official selection at the 7th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

I first read the title for this Australian horror short as iRot, so expected some sort of rotten Apple spoof commercial. It's really I Rot and I'm still not sure exactly why, because what we're given is a corporate drama that uses zombiefication as a metaphor for everything negative about human nature, where all that might fester inside unseen instead festers outside with the assistance of make up effects and CGI flies. It's set at Perfect Touch Cosmetics, a multinational with offices in London, Paris and Tokyo and a boss from Hell called Peter Waterman. He looks like an ass from the first moment we see him and he underlines it as we follow him through the Perfect Touch building on the way to his office. He insults a young lady who shares his lift ride, apparently because she had the audacity to smile at him, and then fires another he passes merely because he doesn't like her cheap perfume. With each negative deed and thought, his external appearance gradually becomes a mirror of his internal state.

With Waterman such an obvious candidate for the character we're going to love to hate, who's going to show up that's sympathetic? Well, the supporting four are just as bad, in fact they're junior versions of Pete, two male and two female. They're all ruthless brown nosed climbers of the corporate ladder and they're eager to figure out what's going to happen in the upcoming restructure or, more accurately, to manipulate how they're going to benefit from it. He invites them to dinner at his place that night, and... well, let's just say that he has more experience being ruthless than they do. The cool curved dagger in his briefcase suggests how far he might be willing to go to hold on to his spot at the top. And, if you're wondering who you might want to root for in this short, I'll confirm that the answer is nobody, at least nobody important enough to be given a name. The two girls at the beginning seemed nice; if it takes wearing cheap perfume to piss off an obnoxious boss, I should have tried it a year or so back.

This is a horror film because Pete rots through most of it. What's notable is that he's the only one who ever brings it up. None of the asskissers do, even though they're clearly nasty pieces of work who have ample opportunity. It's all just metaphorical, an outward visual of what Waterman feels inside. It works as a general concept but I'm not sure what writer/director Josef J Weber aimed at. Was it just negativity in general or a more overt target like eighties style yuppiedom? Was it a specific feeling like jealousy or fear of being replaced? Surely there's a reason that Pete rots while Deacon, Kashia, Dana or Aysh don't, at least one that goes beyond it being his film. The idea seems good, however elusive its details, but I'd have preferred a sympathetic character somewhere to provide us engagement, even a supporting one like a long suffering wife or secretary. Without one, this runs long and slips away from us. There may be a great movie somewhere in this concept but, unfortunately, I Rot is only a fair one.

Zombiefication (2010)

Director: Stefan Lukacs
Stars: Lauren Cooke, Alexander T T Mueller, Lee Oscar Kirchberger and Ursula Weichhart

This film was an official selection at the 7th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

This film was an official selection at Phoenix FearCon IV in Tempe in 2011. Here's an index to my reviews of 2011 films.

This Austrian short is almost the definitive way to open a set of horror shorts at a film festival, as indeed it did at both FearCon IV and the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival here in Phoenix in 2011. It's a faux infomercial that spoofs the spiel that we get from stewardesses at the beginning of flights. Instead of the dangers that might befall us at thirty thousand feet, this entry in the fictional but desirable Total Security Safety Films series addresses the threat of zombies. In the theatre. Yeah, this explains how to identify the living dead in the seats around you and what you can do about it if you find them. I wonder how many people who saw this in theatres really checked under their seats to see if they'd been left a chainsaw or baseball bat, you know, just in case. The catch, of course, is that it's a one joke movie, so while it can't fail to raise a smile on first viewing and prompt theatre owners to sign it up to precede all future screenings, it doesn't stand up to too many repeat viewings.

Beyond the strong idea and the perfect choice of backing muzak, what makes it work so well is the lady who presents these instructions to us. She's Lauren Cooke, credited as a flight-attendant, even though that's just the inspiration for her presentation, and she looks and sounds precisely as she should, never losing her composure even in the face of rather serious adversity. IMDb suggests that she was dubbed by Claudia Kottal, who isn't credited at the end of the film; if that's true she did an amazingly seamless job. Whoever the voice does belong to, it's the only one we hear throughout, suggesting that this is an Australian rather than an Austrian film. The script, written by director Stefan Lukacs, is agreeably funny, if inevitably predictable, and the effects work, always a key factor in any zombie flick, is strong, except for the obvious contact lenses. Cooke aside, it's really not the sort of picture that has opportunities for actors, but David Wurawa and Markus Scholze (I presume) make their presence known as living dead.

The downside is that the piece is slow and sedate, the approach inevitably forcing proceedings to stay safe and free of tension. It's not as internally consistent as it could be, possibly because it deliberately plays for laughs, whatever they might cost the script. I wonder how much better this could have been had Lukacs put the consistency first, with its reanimated corpses there but safely restrained, and built the laughs out of that. Instead he stays relatively close to the flight model, going so far as to translate some parts of the stewardess spiel almost intact, with merely the threat changed to fit. 'Please watch carefully,' she tells us, 'even if you've been a regular victim of zombiefication.' It seems a little unfair, though, to delve deeply into something that's clearly meant to raise a laugh and land the opening slot on horror short selections at festivals the world over. On that front it's a notable success, ensuring that people showing up late with popcorn find their seats pretty quickly, shut up and enjoy the show.

Antisocial (2013)

Director: Cody Calahan
Stars: Michelle Maylett, Cody Ray Thompson, Adam Christie, Ana Alic, Romaine Waite and Ry Barrett

The Japanese have a habit of jumping on the latest technological trend and spinning a dark urban horror story around it. Director Cody Calahan, who also co-wrote Antisocial with Chad Archibald, is a Canadian but he does exactly the same thing here. In spades. In fact, he spends so much time exploring the tech that today's youth takes as utterly routine that he almost forgets that he's making a horror movie. Sure, there's a horror framework: there's a global infection killing billions, while a small group of college kids are trapped inside a house fighting for survival. Sure, there's a great horror scene, as a young lady who has succumbed to the infection illuminates the Christmas lights that bind her, attacks a former friend like a vicious animal, only to be hauled back and thrown into a stairwell to die a second death hanging from her bindings. Sure, there are neatly unusual creature effects and hints at Japanese trendsetters, but it isn't the horror that drives the piece, it's the tech every time, what it is and what it means.

We're deluged with it early on, to the point that entire generations are surely going to be confused. The focus is Samantha Rezner, a young alienated college student. She rings her boyfriend, Dan Hamilton, on her smartphone, only to get his voicemail. Moments later, an alert pops up to highlight that he's posting to a social network site, the Social Redroom. So she hauls out her laptop to check it out, only to find that a chick with a sexy avatar had an amazing time with him last night. Almost before we can read her post, Dan invites Sam to a video chat. He's apparently at a friend's house, surrounded by people in states of undress, distracted enough that he's texting someone while he talks to her. Sam wants him to meet her in person. Dan suggests that they should take a break and, sure enough, the next alert to hit her cell is his relationship status change, from taken to single. Her response is to delete the Social Redroom app entirely. All this unfolds in only two and a half minutes, a dizzying thing for anyone over 25.

And this is actually really important. Youngsters, who populate almost the entire film, will be wondering why she used a laptop at all, rather than just using the app on her phone, or why she typed out the url in full instead of using a bookmark. Older generations are going to ignore the details, read through the whole thing and realise that Sam is pregnant, especially given her reactions to other things around her, like the sight of blood. Yet it's this distraction that's key. The modern ADD generation could get caught up by this story, as they've grown up grokking this sort of omnipresent technology, which surrounds them and comforts them. To them, this story may have substance that may resonate uncomfortably enough for them to get a disturbing kick out of the thing, but I doubt it. It doesn't do much that's new on the horror front. However, anyone old enough to remember dialup, rotary phones or pagers will be automatically distanced and will probably find the whole thing fundamentally stupid.

Where Antisocial may have most value is with the people in between, young enough to understand the various technological concepts in play but old enough to not be owned by them. This is because it's far more of a commentary on our relationship to technology than it is a zombie apocalypse movie. Sam is the most important focus, partly because she's the most, and arguably the only, fleshed out character in the entire film, but also partly because she relies the least on technology. She constantly appears to be the odd one out because she can step away from the always connected world that her peers live in and she actually seems to like doing that. Even before we realise what's driving the end of the world, we're already sure that everyone is doomed except her, if only because of pattern recognition: one of these things is not like the others, right? Apply that to the story after, say, a quarter of an hour, and you'll be able to write the rest of the script pretty accurately.

Michelle Mylett is effective as Sam, even though the fundamentals of her character mean that she has to underplay it for most of the film. Her job here is to highlight the way out, not by doing things (except one rather enjoyably icky thing during the finalé) but by not doing them. Everyone else does them and that's why they're doomed. She doesn't, much, which is why she survives. Her real story begins as the film ends, in what could easily become a very different sequel indeed, one that would be hugely more accessible to a wide audience. This entire picture could be neatly summarised in the opening text and then we'd watch pregnant Sam kick ass for an hour and a half in the ashes of the world. I'd watch that movie, for sure. Unfortunately this isn't that movie, it's merely the opening text brought to life and it's far from the same thing. Mylett, earning her first IMDb credit here, is the biggest human reason that it works as well as it does, but she's clearly subservient to the commentary.

I wondered a lot during the first half of the film if Calahan had forgotten anything to throw in to boost that commentary. His characters are all generic and broadly drawn: Steve McDonald, the token black guy; Kaitlin Cosgrove, his blonde girlfriend; Jed Erickson, the joker; and Mark Archibald, the nice guy. The actors do their jobs but there's nothing much for them to do because they're so transparent. It's what Calahan gives them to play with that we're focused on throughout: Steve films Kaitlin on his phone because she wants to make a sex tape, while Jed can't stop watching a webcam show, the one that backed the opening credits with freaky effect. This is a clever inclusion that really underlines the story; it's a fundamentally insubstantial piece of fluff, just two girls talking about what clothes they've just bought, but then one brutally murders the other in cold blood because she's infected. She comes back to the camera to tell the world and can't turn off the connection. It goes viral, pun intended.

In many ways, this is Dawn of the Dead: The Next Generation. Just as Romero updated his zombies to riff on consumerism, having them mindlessly congregate at the mall because of herd instinct, Calahan updates the concept to the digital age. These characters aren't consumers, they're creators, even if its meaningless content. They're people who live on social networks; they're the YouTube generation. Calahan sets up a few expected scenes but then deflates them. Should Mark and his friends let Chad into the house, given that he's bleeding from the nose and ears and so must be infected? A decade ago, they'd open the door and soon regret it. Here they mull for a moment then leave him to die, then check the media to see what's happening. Almost every zombie movie I've seen includes characters watching the TV for news, but in this one, that's all they do. Even with the zombie apocalypse unfolding outside, they watch it online. These folk would go to a live gig and watch it through their recording iPhones.

There are great ironies here that many won't notice; they'll surely fly far over the heads of anyone who tweets their lunch or feels drawn to check in on Facebook every time they visit the bathroom. Most of them can't be explored here because that would spoil the ending, but I can point out that for a script that revolves so clearly around internet addiction and the concept of trust in the digital age, I found it frankly hilarious to see how it all went down. I can safely highlight a minor moment though that shows up during the glorious death scene I mentioned at the beginning of this review. The infected character thrown into the stairwell at the end of Christmas lights apparently held on to her phone throughout her brief zombie phase. It drops to the floor below her as she dies afresh. It's only a brief shot, but I couldn't help but see the manifesto of the characters we watch, and by extension the entire generation it aims to caricature. You can have her cellphone only if you pry it from her cold, dead hands...

I liked Antisocial but I probably fit in that middle demographic; anyone older than me is going to find it stupid, while anyone younger may not get it. It wouldn't surprise me to find this generally derided, but with an aware audience consistently defending it on merits that the rest don't see. There are homages here to other horror movies; there's a live exorcism online that looks rather reminiscent of Linda Blair's footage shot on webcam and the name of the social network is very telling. Redroom! Redroom! There are neatly impressionistic audiovisual montage sequences that go beyond the usual, mostly by adding sound triggers alongside the usual video ones. The agreeably icky creature effects are superbly done, though they're rarely used and mostly disguised as hallucinations; they're icky, black and neatly alive. Perhaps the most likely common ground is going to be the score, Steph Copeland's first, which shines. It's a pulsing electronic piece, but not in the usual ways. It may be all that spans the generations.

Encounter (2010)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Scott Scheall and Jennifer E Rio

Travis Mills and his Running Wild team met their undeniably ambitious challenge for 2013, to shoot 52 short films, all based on stories from the public domain, in 52 weeks. They will be premiered at a three night event at Mariscos Vuelve a la Vida in downtown Phoenix in early February, so with such a wealth of new material about to erupt from Running Wild, I thought I'd travel the other way in time to review the earliest Mills title with an IMDb page that I haven't already covered at Apocalypse Later. It's an old film for Running Wild, a 2010 comedy short called Encounter, that hints at where they would go in the coming years but also shows that in many ways they hadn't got there yet. It's a little rough, especially in the sound department, for which there's no credit; presumably they hadn't found James Alire yet. It isn't a shining example of camerawork either (though the back and forth on the bench is surprisingly effective), but the editing partly makes up. However the rest is all a little reminiscent of future work.

We open in a parking lot where an unnamed young lady accosts a stranger because she thinks it's her ex-husband, Josh. It turns out to be a completely different Josh, who sparks the plot by not just walking away when the mistake is realised. In fact, he's apparently enticed by her abrasive nature. All her body language screams 'walk away', but he asks her to lunch. Her response is, 'I think all men are two faced bastards,' but she accepts anyway and, before long, she becomes the questioner, pressing for all sorts of details. The ending isn't a surprise, given that it was telegraphed at the very beginning, but it opens up other questions that are perhaps the best part of the film. While we find out a lot about this girl, who doesn't have a name, we find out almost nothing about Josh Anderson, for whom we're given two. Is he really just this charming or is there some sort of meaning to their supposedly accidental meeting? The script, by Running Wild co-founder Gus Edwards, doesn't tell us. It wants us to answer that ourselves.

That's one of the tells that this is a Running Wild picture, as primitive as it is when compared to more recent output. So many of their shorts are character pieces, in which actors are tasked to finding their characters even with details missing, often crucial ones. Here Jennifer E Rio does a pretty solid job as a woman clearly still damaged by her broken marriage; it's telling that we're given her husband's name but not hers, as if he's still who defines her. Certainly she's short on trust but quick to temper, which is why we wonder so much about where this film ends up. If she wears her emotions like her lowcut dress, itself a hint that she may be subconsciously looking to move on, Josh Anderson leaves the story as the mystery as which he began it. We're given all sorts of enticing hints about who or what he might be but never actually told much that he is. Scott Scheall underplays the role appropriately, so we wonder at the moments when he does something and especially at the ones when he doesn't.

Encounter isn't a bad short but it's far from a great one. Its value is mostly historical, as an indicator of what would come from Running Wild, at an increasing pace and with increasing technical mastery, over the ensuing years. We've been given a lot more characters for us and the actors both to work to figure out. We've been given a lot more moments in time that are worthy of telling, even if what came before and what might come after may not be. We've heard a lot more old time public domain music, not only in The Big Something, where it was put to much better use than here, where it feels like a placeholder. We've been shown a lot more deceptively clever choreography, where what happens on screen is often notably enhanced by an understanding of how it happens as much as why it happens. We've also been given more sexual deviancy and edgy drama, far more overtly too. The more Running Wild films I see, the more telling early films like Encounter, Man/Woman/Motel Room and The Ruffians become.

Encounter can be watched for free at Vimeo and YouTube.
Details about the 52 Films/52 Weeks screening event can be found on Facebook.