I have to give it to Joseph L. Martinez, “Knock” is a fun and scary Halloween treat that should be watched by folks that like their scares short but sweet. “Knock” is based around a simple premise but ends on a delightfully clever bang. Murielle just spent Halloween night with her friends in an abandoned mine. Said mine allegedly houses the spirit of an ancient witch who stalks you if you knock on the mine walls three times.
As a Star Wars fan, one of the biggest disappointments of sitting through 1999’s “The Phantom Menace” was watching the creation of one of the most amazing villains of the “Star Wars” cinematic universe, only for him to show up for about five minutes, be killed, and then never spoken of again. This character that was on mugs, and t shirts, and posters was almost non-existent in future films. “Apprentice” is a fantastic and dare I say perfect, fan film that shows what would have happened if George Lucas subtracted twenty minutes of screen time from Jar Jar Binks in favor of more emphases on the sheer danger and threat that was Darth Maul. Maul should have been the recurring villain in the prequels and could have salvaged the otherwise terrible films.
Andrew Robertson’s post apocalyptic drama is quite the accomplishment. it’s almost like a zombie film without the zombies, focusing primarily on the threat of mankind and how ugly we can be when the resources run low. Robertson’s film presents a villain in every person that the family we center on meets, and how vile people can be when they’re hungry and dehydrated. “Refuge” is set directly after a pandemic involving a plague that is untreatable with any known antibiotics. After most of the population is wiped out, the rest of mankind is left foraging for food and trying to maintain some sense of humanity.
Director Shant Hamassian’s short horror film is a rather excellent meta-tale that takes the classic horror slasher movie tropes and places them in to a new light. What if you could control the idea of the slasher coming to your door attacking with you a set of rules a la “Scream”? That’s the case for a young beautiful girl who is home alone at night. When we first see her, she’s this insanely sexy girl dancing in her lacy skivvies, but upon fully glancing at her person are a witness to the stitched wound she wears on her throat. The scar and silence says all, as she was clearly the victim of a vicious attack by a killer meant to end her life, but somehow survived.
Director Remington Smith’s “The Woods” is quite an accomplishment, mainly because it’s a film set in the middle of a snowy tundra implementing zero special effects. The centerpiece of “The Woods” is our character’s surroundings and how she has to adapt to the snowy wasteland of the woods. Apparently Smith and cinematographer Joshua Yates used mostly natural lighting for their film, resulting in a masterfully eerie and haunting short film set during a fight for survival. There’s so much conveyed in “The Woods” and yet there isn’t single word of dialogue spoken.
Man is “The Shutterbug Man” amazing. The only complaint I can lobby toward it is that it feels more like a prologue to a feature length horror film than an actual short, but i hope director Christopher Walsh turns this idea in to a horror movie somewhere down the line. Told in brilliant and haunting Stop Motion. the legendary Barbara Steele narrates the tale of “The Shutterbug Man.” With simplistic albeit immensely effective and haunting stop motion, Christopher Walsh tells us the tale of the Shutterbug Man, a local who spent his time taking pictures. He could only really take pictures of horrific sights and suffering as it granted him a sick pleasure.
Nic Barker’s short film is an idea that could have easily translated in to a compelling romance drama. Barker practices the idea of mumblecore and it works beautifully to convey a foursome of relationships that have either reach their expiration date, or are about to very soon. “Dead Sharks” is more of an ensemble drama based around the Woody Allen quote about how relationships have to move forward like sharks or they die. These relationships are attempting to move forward, but it doesn’t take a genius to see they’re dead.