Screenhead

No, really.

There’s a short film on YouTube–in retrospect it never should have been this big of a surprise–called The Horribly Slow Murderer With The Extremely Inefficient Weapon.

And as Jack Cucchiaio finds himself running from his life from the poorly armed maniac, he finds himself in a race against time–an extremely slow race, granted, but a race nonetheless!–to find out the truth behind this killer before the killer can finish his deadly, extremely long term, project.

I about laughed myself stupid watching this.  Seriously–these are guys who know their horror movies, because they’re frantically mocking virtually every convention ever involved in a horror movie.  Watching this horribly slow murder go down was just hilarious.  And yet at the same time, a little creepy.  They really knew what they were doing, and so I recommend it openly.  The movie itself actually drags on, much like the killing itself.

So does the Screenhead Ten Scale, which knows a laugh when it sees it.  Short film or no, this is hilarious stuff and absolutely deserves its eight out of ten.

You know, folks, I’m not sure how this chunklet of news eluded me for as long as it did, but I’m glad I finally managed to catch up with it.  I know, I know, I only just covered the movie itself like a week ago, I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, but the fact remains that Paranormal Activity has at least three alternate endings.

And if you’ll follow the link here, you’ll be able to see this alternate ending for yourself.  You’ll probably discover, much the same way I did, that it’s a good thing they went with the ending they did as it’s much, much more interesting.

Though I wonder…was it?  Was it for the best?  After all, Paranormal Activity was a good movie in and of itself.  If the ending hadn’t been quite so satisfying, and they released the “alternate”, significantly BETTER, ending later, wouldn’t that just have sparked interest further?

Well, that’s neither here nor there as Paranormal Activity was a great movie with a fantastic ending as it was.

You’ve got to give the crew behind Creeper a little credit for effort–they recorded all their own music to add onto this three minute short film. It’s too bad that that’s pretty much the only area in which they succeeded.

In this one, a young man finds himself running afoul of some random monster or possibly human that sounds like he’s been chain-smoking rope since the eighties.  Anyway, this human / monster thing is dispatched to kill the young man for some reason, but we don’t know what that reason is.  All we know is, his time is UP.

And yes, the musical score is pretty nifty, but what they forgot to do was actually make a movie.  There’s no coherent plot here outside of some fart noises on voice mail and a guy getting killed for no clear reason.  I’m not even sure whether the guy that did the killing was a man or a monster.  And what’s with all the coughing?  The movie was actually TOO short, leaving a lot of its issues unresolved.

There are a great many questions that I don’t have answers to because Creeper didn’t bother to create them.

The Screenhead Ten Scale respects the musical side of this whole short endeavor, but at the same time, can’t help but be a little unsettled by the fact that there’s not much of a, you know, MOVIE here.  It thusly hands out a three out of ten.

When a film company titles itself Mediocre Films, it’s hard to tell whether you should expect their work to be good or expect to be, well, mediocre.  But today’s short film, a fairly interesting piece from Mediocre entitled Trick or Treat, is at least fairly good.

Two guys are hanging out in one of their houses and talking about movies they should make when they get the idea to make a documentary.   Wondering who would make the best documentary target, they hit on a random stranger hanging around outside the house who knocks on the door with one message–trick or treat.  But when we find out more about the random stranger, we discover that he brings plenty of trouble in his trick or treat bag.

It’s hard to tell where Trick or Treat is going, primarily because it makes almost no sense at all for most of its six minute run time.  By the time it gets to the horror part of the show, you’re so abjectly lost that literally anything could happen.  This is actually an interesting effect as most horror flicks like to telegraph their punches from the word go, but this one will keep you guessing.

In fact, if you can stay interested until the very end, you’ll likely discover that the whole thing makes a lot more sense looking back than going forward, and that’s a lot like life itself.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this strange analogy for life itself a six out of ten–it’s confusing, yes, but it’s also funny and just a bit creepy, and that’s a great combination.

You know, I’ve seen PLENTY of horror movies focusing on elevators.  Black Out, The Shaft, there was even a lot of elevator action figuring into the old Dario Argento title Demons 2.  The thought of being stuck in an elevator or falling down an elevator shaft fills more than a few people with cold dread.  So it’s not too much of a surprise to see Hellevator, a movie that tries to play on that cold dread.

This time, it’s about what it sounds like–an elevator that goes straight to hell itself.  And for one young man, it’s going to be the ride of his afterlife.

It’s an interesting idea, and they did manage to get some clever action movie dialogue in there–for a short film, this is an especially decent idea.  The big problem with it, though, is that only occasionally are snippets of dialogue so loud as to be heard.  I had my speakers up nice, and the YouTube volume itself on full–which blasts a video I found of Rehab’s Sitting At A Bar just fine.

But aside from that, Hellevator is a nifty concept poorly executed, so you know what the Screenhead Ten Scale’s got in mind: a five out of ten.

You’ve got to hand it to a movie like Sat Nav for putting out one of the strangest concepts I’ve seen lately.  But can they follow through?  Read on.

What Sat Nav is about is, pretty much, a satellite navigation system.  But it’s a badly flawed system–so badly flawed it’s actually evil.And when the evil sat nav sends a group of Halloween party-seekers on their way to a Halloween party at a place they’ve never been before, well, you know all hell’s going to break loose.

On the one hand, yes, it’s a great idea and there are plenty of creepy scenes.  But on the other hand, there are plenty of scenes where you can’t see anything because, once again, they’ve filmed at night and they don’t really know how to do it so you can actually see stuff.  That and there’s this horrendous sequence at the end that’s way too loud.

So the Screenhead Ten Scale is left to split its decision for a movie that’s got plenty of good for all its bad and give a five out of ten.  It’s a great idea, poorly executed.

More previous work of the late Heath Ledger is surfacing once again. Screenhead introduced Ledger’s King Rat, an animated short, some time ago.

 Now, Cause and Effect has surfaced in the news today. 

Ledger was known for saying “Talent begets Talent.” The Godfather of Australasian Hip Hop – Nfamas of 1200 Techniques – made a decision to go out on his own as No Fixed Abode. He approached his childhood friend, the late Heath Ledger, to direct his first music video. 

Ledger loved to immense himself in music, and reportedly he believed in Nfa’s talent and ability to become a Hip Hop star on his own. Together, with Ledger as director, they created Nfa’s first music video Cause and Effect.  Clearly we can see Ledger’s talent as an artistic director and the potential future he had as a director. The ability Ledger had to boldly embody the No Fixed Abode fundamental spirit, is very clear in this extraordinary music video.

It’s sad to lose such talent as Ledger, but at least we have the spirit of his work today that will live forever.

I really hate to do this to this short film, but the problem is that Ghost Haunt has a SERIOUS problem with it that can’t be overlooked.  More on that in a minute.

Basically, this short is all about a guy named Dorje who gets scared by a dragon mask early on in the film, and his buddies make fun of him for it.  Dorje, who wants to prove his manhood, announces that he has Gurkha blood (which is actually a pretty big deal in the subcontinent) and will prove his badass blood by any means necessary.  Thus, he’s dispatched to a haunted park to hammer a nail and record the evidence on his camera.   What he finds in the park, however, is definitely not what he sees coming.

Ghost Haunt is actually pretty fair, if a bit–okay, a LOT–derivative of other movies just like it, but the problem is that whoever ran this movie has not clue one of how to shoot at night.  Thus, we’re left with long black stretches of footage in which all you can see is a flashlight bobbing around.

I love that this is actual, honest to goodness foreign film, but for crying out loud, I want to be able to SEE it.

Thus, due to massive technical errors, Ghost Haunt can only scare up a three out of ten on the Screenhead Ten Scale.

So I’ve stumbled onto a big batch of a minor league movement in short film making–a strange kind of psuedo-machinima involving characters from The Sims in short film settings, and today we’ve got The Punishment up for review.

Basically, a bunch of children that look like they were pulled whole and breathing out of Village of the Damned go forth and set fire to things, and people, with their minds.  But what happens to these “demon spawn” is more horrible than you can imagine.

Actually, it’s not so much horrible as it is hilarious.

In all honesty though, for a quick two minute shot of movie, it won’t be half bad.  It’ll actually be pretty entertaining.  Oh, sure, I have no idea where these children came from or how they got to be pyrokinetics, or anything like that, but I know what happened to them in the end and I know it’s pretty funny.

The Screenhead Ten Scale stifles its laughter long enough to hand over a six out of ten for this slightly better than average low budget romp.

It’s a clever little title, isn’t it?  Peculiar Aisle?  What is it?  What’s IN it?  There’s all manner of delightful little questions to ask, but which ones actually made it into the film?

For a guy who just finished watching a horror movie, his shopping trip becomes an unexpected nightmare when he finds the “peculiar aisle”.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this one is that they take a good idea and then proceed to crumple it up into a tight little ball and then toss it out the window in favor of whatever the hell it was they actually did here.  The plot is lost on me.  It’s just some guy wandering around a grocery store for a while, occasionally running into another guy who’s creepy as all hell but doesn’t seem to pose any actual threat because he leaves politely when the store manager speaks to him.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives a baffled “huh?” to the entire proceedings and gives Peculiar Aisle a benefit-of-the-doubt five out of ten, because it’s possible we both just missed something here.