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.
I’ve sampled horror flicks from all around the world, and I’ve found that most of them have a pretty regional flavor to them. The Japanese and Koreans, for example, love ghost flicks. The Europeans favor the theme of man’s inhumanity to man. And most horror I’ve come across from other lands is at least fairly good. Joining the ranks of the best, however, is a little title from Poland, The 206.
It’s about a guy who wakes up in a stairwell, semi-conscious, unable to figure out what’s going on. As he sets out to reconstruct his life, he finds out there more going on here than he realizes.
The best part about this one? There’s NO DIALOGUE. The story is being told entirely through the actor and through the background music, both of which are quite thoroughly awesome. The ending, however, is somewhat unclear and can be interpreted several ways, something I never like.
However, the rest of the film is enough to wrangle a rare eight out of ten from the Screenhead Ten Scale, who was sufficiently on edge through most of it to appreciate its sheer Hitchcockian tendencies.
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.
There’s always something interesting to watch on YouTube–all you have to do is find it. And today, I’m going to try to help you in that regard by offering up a new review target: the short film Murderers Don’t Ring Doorbells.
It features a young man walking home from a football game (or at least I think that’s the case, they weren’t very clear on that point) when suddenly he’s beset upon by a guy in a Michael Myers mask. Yes, I know it’s a William Shatner mask, but let’s face it, Michael made it his own.
Anyway, the rest of the night for our young man will involve, mostly, running from killers.
I have to admit, I laughed at more than one point in here, but the whole thing suffers from unclear scripting and a huge muddle in every direction. I barely understood what was going on half the time because it just plain old wasn’t very clear what they were trying to do.
The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, rewards effort and a few good laughs by issuing this unclear slush of a short film a four out of ten. The next one will, hopefully, prove better.
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.
Under normal circumstances, folks, when someone tells me about a Twilight parody, I’m all over it like Lindsay Lohan on a sack full of white powder. But when you say that the Twilight parody in question will involve PUPPETS, now, there’s just no way you’re going to keep me out.
Yes, one of my least favorite movies ever, Twilight, gets skewered in a grand YouTube experience called “Twilight: The Puppet Saga”.
It is hilarious, mostly because it’s accurate, and because the creator of the film couldn’t stop referring to pretty much everyone except Bella as “Team (Fill in the blank).” He even had Edward wearing a shirt that read “Team Edward”, and he called him that all throughout the short.
Twilight fans out there–this is what the rest of the world sees whenever it watches that movie. Seriously. It’s not fun.
The Screenhead Ten Scale recovers from its newest paroxysm of helpless laughter to hand this sweet dose of puppet fun an eight out of ten for sheer raw awesome.
You know, you’ve got to feel for a movie that’s got big brass ones sufficient to make THIS its synopsis:
A short film horror movie about a haunted house and two investigators were sent in on the night of december 12 2008 at 11:15 pm by the president to investigate the house and kill whats in it.
Does that sound like the intro paragraph to an eighties video game to anyone else? Like a weird mix of Ghostbusters and Bad Dudes. But this strange synopsis aside, how does it watch?
Sadly, it watches like a really low budget mix of Ghostbusters and Bad Dudes. Seriously, this is pretty bad. And I understand this is, apparently, two kids screwing around with a camera, but considering how much of the dialogue is lost to wind in the mike, and how much of the dialogue wasn’t audible even when they were OUT of the wind and the fact that they left their blooper reel in the movie itself (at one point, one of the “investigators” will turn on a light in a room, only to have it quickly turned off again by the other investigator.)
The Screenhead Ten Scale understands that they tried, but due to cripplingly massive technical problems and a complete lack of editing hands it a three out of ten.
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.