For this week’s edition of “Shorts Round Up of the Week” we view the apocalypse through two lenses, dissect nature through the killer whale, and look at the cycle of life through animation.
If you’d like to submit your short film for review consideration, submissions are always opened to filmmakers and producers.
Season nine was a big turning point for “The Walking Dead,” it’s the season where we lost a ton of big players in the series including Lauren Cohan and one main character Andrew Lincoln. With the exit of both dramatic forces, “The Walking Dead” has had a ton of foot work to cover, and season nine was a pretty good rebound that’s managed to keep the pace going now that the main driving force of the show has left. With a very good season, “The Walking Dead” presented some stand out moments. These are ten of the most shocking.
Hal Barwood’s “Warning Sign” is the example of a movie with a great concept and idea, but with almost no really good delivery of said concept. “Warning Sign” is a surprising pre-cursor to films like “28 Days Later” and “Resident Evil” but never quite manages to reach the level of tension as the aforementioned titles. Instead “Warning Sign” garners a great cast with a fairly uneven and sometimes goofy delivery of a premise that could have been wrought with terror and themes about science gone awry.
Despite generally loving movies about the supernatural, and in spite of “The Plague of the Zombies” being very much ahead of its time in its implementing of voodoo as a means of our villain enacting his devious plan, I was indifferent toward “The Plague of the Zombies.” I can’t say that I completely hated it, but while it packs in some tension and great mood set pieces, I wasn’t too sad when it finally drew to a close.
One of the best movies of 2018, “Anna and the Apocalypse” is a movie that’s destined to catch on with midnight audiences, as it begs for sing alongs from an enthusiastic audience. John McPhail’s zombie horror musical is a pastiche of the best from the genres it puts on the big screen, delivering what is one of the pleasing and creepiest zombie movies of the years. “Anna and the Apocalypse” manages to be both life affirming and a spectacularly vicious zombie movie at the same time, with some of the more entertaining musical numbers and sequences filmed in a long time.
Screamfest LA 2018 had a ton of shorts on offer, including some stunning and weird titles that were played in blocks over the weekend attached to random features. Here are but a few of these.
A group of stoner friends finds themselves and their zombie knowledge tested when the apocalypse hits and the dead walk the Earth.
Written by Max Groah and Tim Mayo with Groah directing, Bong of the Living Dead is a fun and funny take on the zombie apocalypse and on friends with odd skills managing to do better than most. Their take on the sub-genre is one that doesn’t bring a ton of new things to the table but their vision uses things that are familiar in great ways. On a smaller scale, it reminds of Shaun of the Dead in that the filmmakers and cast have a clear love of zombies and zombie films and they bring it to the screen here in a manner that is entertaining and respectful of the films they clearly adore. The writing is clever and the direction keeps everything tight.