Screenhead

So today I’ve come in contact with one of the first ever examples of Screamkings online videomaking–the question is, is their short title For Indoor Use Only any good?  Let’s watch!

A young man, working with some Christmas lights, curses the holiday in a moment of frustration.  And when that happens, Christmas decides to take its revenge.

Admittedly, Christmas horror is in fairly short supply.  But this particular example is kind of sparse.  Sparse like the needles on Charlie Brown’s tree.  Oh, sure, what’s here is done fairly well, but it’s not very satisfying.  It’s almost like the Christmas mashed potatoes, or shaped sugar cookies without frosting.  Far from the best, but not necessarily offensive.

The Screenhead Ten Scale shrugs in the general direction of this lackluster title and awards it a five out of ten.  While there isn’t anything really wrong with it, it lacks the necessary force to be called good.  The best you can say about it is that it’s merely mediocre.

Well, despite a whole lot of stops and starts, and the arrest of the original series’ writer, it seems that Silent Hill 2 may not be completely dead.  In fact, it’s so alive that they’re projecting a release date…in 2010.

Dig the word from the series’ designer:

“I was working on storyboards for that around the same time last year…It’s going to be pretty crazy. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there. Roger (Avary) has some awesome ideas and hopefully we’re going to bring that to fruition sometime next year.”

Yeah…too bad Roger (Avary)’s in lockdown, buddy.  But hey, if Roman Polanski can engineer his movie from prison then maybe Roger Avary can drop some notes down or something.  Stranger things have happened, and many of them have happened to us.

I have to admit, I’d kind of like to see where they go with it.  After the miserable ending the last one had, I have no idea what they’re planning to do.  There’s not even much of anything they CAN do.  I mean, two of the three mains are ghosts of some kind and the third is sort of, well, still around.

So what can they do?  I don’t know. And that intrigues me.

It’s probably about time we got a few more amateur Saw parodies.  The franchise is indeed rife with possibilities, and today, we tackle Saw XIV, or, The One Where Saw Constantly Screws Up.

The title basically gives away the premise and the plot–Jigsaw’s death traps (now Hoffman’s death traps) have always been mechanically complex wonders of amateur engineering.  But what would happen if those darn death traps just wouldn’t work right?

They’ve got a really good point, actually.  All this stuff is incredibly complex–I mean, just one slipped gear or misfired sparkplug and the next thing you know, blammo! No death trap.

And the best part is, this is actually really funny.  Though as it turns out, it’s not alone.  Just because I hadn’t heard of them before, apparently there are a LOT of Saw parodies out there.

The downside here is that the movie was made clearly by people who either didn’t see the Saw series or didn’t watch much of it, as they’re continually referring to Jigsaw as “Saw”, not to mention dressing him up like Little Billy, when we really should be seeing either Jigsaw himself or the “replacement” Jigsaw that is Detective Hoffman.

Anyway, the Screenhead Ten Scale just wiped away a tear of hilarious laughter and hands Saw XIV a seven out of ten. Admittedly, it’s low budget, and they clearly only have a loose idea of what they’re parodying, but the comedy more than makes up for the lack of effects work.

Okay, so people weren’t too enthused by the Screenhead Film Festival’s big prize giveaway (it was ten DVDs, man!  That’s got a retail value of like two, maybe three hundred bucks!), but I’ve got something here that might put some fire in your belly.

It’s the Indieroar Film Festival, and I just got word of it from director Alan Rowe Kelly.  Top prize?  Five THOUSAND dollars.

Plus, you’ll also get some film editing software with that.  And if that isn’t enough, there are also second and third prizes too, a thousand bucks a crack.  Entries are being accepted in five categories: horror, drama, comedy, animation and documentary, and each entry must be UNDER twenty five minutes in length.

The public will vote on the gathered films, and winnow down the entries to the top twenty five in each category, the winners of which will be decided by a jury.

So if you’re a short film maker and you’re up for a shot at five grand, grab your camcorder and get to shooting.  Deadline for entry is January 15th, 2010.

So I found another interesting short on YouTube to take a run at, and it’s the hardest sort of film to discuss–the movie that’s so confusing that it’s downright scary.

It’s actually hard to give you a plot synopsis without spoilering, mostly because this film is only about two and a half minutes long.  But suffice it to say, anyone with a fear of clowns need not apply.  And anyone who’s not fond of unusual dinner choices should also stay waaaaaay far away from this.

It’s pretty awesome, in one sense–a lot of really creepy stuff is going to happen here, but the only real problem with it is that not much of it will make sense.  It’s pretty scary in that regard, because nothing here will exactly be expected, but at the same time, it’s SO far off kilter that it’s kind of tough to follow, and any coherence in the plot is just SHOT.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives a quizzical look at the whole thing, shrugs, gives a hearty meh and hands A Kid At Heart a six out of ten.  It’s scary, sure, but it’s also really, REALLY, confusing.

So Anchor Bay sent us out another in their long line of interesting titles the other day, and to that end, today we’re going to be talking The Forgotten.

Featuring Simon Baker from The Mentalist as a guy with a past revolving around some kind of bizarre Mexican death cult, he thinks he’s managed to move on…until his daughter goes missing.  And that’s when our boy finds himself neck deep in his past, going forth to attempt to find his missing daughter.

Admittedly, I found most of this movie pretty strange, and where it wasn’t strange it was just slow.  I got the feeling that I was missing large parts of it because I was completely lost by the subtext.  See, most of us really don’t know about or understand or even CARE about stuff like La Santa Muerte if it even actually exists.  But there are plenty of more subtle elements at work here–some deeper mystery aspects that make for a somewhat interesting title.

Sadly, though, there’s plenty of confusion here also, and that definitely doesn’t help things.  In fact, by the time it really gets interesting, it’s almost over. The ending is actually a pretty good twist, but it’s not really worth the trip.

The Screenhead Ten Scale looks at this slow, plodding wreck of a suspense movie, shakes its head in sorrow and hands it a five out of ten.  It’s nothing particularly bad yet it’s too dull and listless to be much of anything good, either.

Okay, on the off chance that you’re looking forward to the re-emergence of the Scream series in the form of Scream 4, then you’re not going to want to read what you’re about to read.

It’s a HUGE spoiler alert.  Huge.

Apparently, there’s at least some chance–and this comes from writer Kevin Williamson–that Sydney may not live past the end credits.  Quoth Williamson:

“The thing about ‘Scream 4′ is that there are a lot of twists and turns, so I can’t promise anything,” he told PopWrap about Sidney’s role in the fourth film now that Neve will return. “There are a lot of moving pieces, so we’ll see — but if you’re a ‘Scream’ fan, I think you’re really going to like it.”

Now, the most disconcerting part about this is that it’s so very feasible.  See, Neve Campbell was essentially the weak link in this particular chain, and for a while it was unsure that she’d even come back at all.  It’s entirely possible that, at this point, Neve agreed to come back…one more time.

And that means they’d need to get rid of her.  What better way than to write her out?  It’ll be a good long while before we find out either way, but you know we’ll fill you in when we know!

Well here’s a chunk of news guaranteed to baffle and unsettle all at once.  Apparently, J.J. Abrams was working on converting the Stephen King novel series The Dark Tower into a series of films, when suddenly he realized that this was going to be a VASTLY bigger job than he’d realized and pushed the whole thing aside.

This means at the very least there will be a delay, because it’s as yet unclear whether Abrams is just taking a break, is killing the whole thing off, or handing off to another director / writer / team of same.

In all honesty, this is a deeply disturbing sign.  While it’s good to see that Abrams understands his limitations, this means probably nothing but trouble for King fans who wanted to see the Dark Tower movie make the same nigh-miraculous comeback as the book line did.

But with Abrams either temporarily abdicated or out of action for good, the progress of the Dark Tower movie is likely halted with him.

I’m always pretty excited to talk about short films, especially all the short horror you see running around online.  You never know what you’re going to get when you tear into one of these little pieces of short film–it’s like nonstop Christmas.

So today we’re looking at Life Cycle, and it’s one movie that’s probably better called How The Zombie Apocalypse Might Begin.

Basically, some guy’s out walking on an empty stretch of beach when he finds a corpse that washes up.  But this corpse has a lot more life in him than anyone saw coming….

It’s always kind of interesting to consider how a zombie apocalypse might look in its very earliest stages, so this one definitely qualifies as interesting.  Of course, it being a short film, it’s over LONG before anything actually happens, so it’s not like we’re going to get a whole lot of entertainment out of it.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this interesting, well put together, but ultimately disappointing zombie title a six out of ten for doing what it could with what it had to work with well inside its rather sizable limits.

You ever have one of those weird cultural experience where you’re looking at something REALLY REALLY SUPER IMPORTANT to some other culture but you don’t understand one bit of it?  So you’re trying to be polite while they dance around and set each other on fire or drink each other’s urine or something and you’re convinced that they’re all just completely bonkers?

That’s exactly what Seventh Moon is like.

Lions Gate sent me out a copy of this, the third of four installments in the latest go-round of the Ghost House Underground series, and it’s a doozy, I’ll tell you that much.  See, Seventh Moon is all about the seventh lunar month in the Chinese calendar.  And in that month, they have this big whopping festival in which they burn paper and sacrifice whatnot so that the spirits of the dead–let loose from hell in a very Halloween-style fashion–can hunt up the living and find some new recruits.

Now, this is actually a pretty scary idea, and it’s done fairly well, but there were so many stretches where I had no idea what was going on.  It was creepy, yes, but mostly it was creepy because I didn’t understand it.  And considering it was written by the director of The Blair Witch Project and produced by Haxan Films, also of The Blair Witch Project, it wasn’t that surprising that half of the movie was sort of lost in sheer gobbledygook.

Oh, and when they actually busted out “this map is useless” in the opening minutes, I about bust a gut.  Shrieking laughter through my tears, I asked if they were planning to kick it in the river next.

Sadly, though, the Blair Witch cinematography is back in full force also, with plenty of bouncy camera action to vaguely revolt you.

That was the biggest problem here–it was a good idea, just not done very well, but a lot better than I expected from Haxan.

So the Screenhead Ten Scale responds to the shock by handing the spooky boogeymen of Seventh Moon a six out of ten.  it wasn’t particularly bad, but there was plenty wrong with it, too.