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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
We’ve seen lots of underground horror around here–and I mean that literally. We’ve had church basements and cellars and everything else, so it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that today we’re going to the basement!
And for a young man, alone in the house playing Xbox Live after discovering his mother has gone to the store and left him with the simple task of bringing up a roll of Bounty from the basement, that basement is going to be a lot more dangerous than he imagines.
Basically, Basement is one long, rolling fight scene that will take place all over the house. It’s not too bad, as long as you like your horror with a lot of action in it.
Sure, the plot is simplistic, and the action is a bit overdone and there are some serious problems with continuity and engineering (the video will regularly stutter for some reason, the main character runs pretty well on his stabbed leg before remembering his leg was stabbed, and for some reason, the main character will hit his pursuer with the narrow end of a baseball bat.), but otherwise, this sucker’s not half bad.
Frankly, I have seen vastly worse.
The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, gives a nod of respect to two young up and coming filmmaker types and hopes to spur them on by giving them a better than average six out of ten. Not bad, guys. Next time, something with a bit more PLOT, okay?
It’s never a good idea to include hyperbole like “shocking” in the description of your short film, unless it’s part of a quote. Because you talking up your own short film outside of marketing materials generally doesn’t end well. But will The Final Boy suffer from its own excess of exuberance? Let’s take a look.
A businessman named John finds himself stalked by a horrible vision of a demonic little boy. Will he be able to shake this vision? Or will it haunt him to death…and beyond?
I’m actually very surprised at how this turned out. Yes, indeed, it IS shocking. Their hyperbole is actually quite warranted as they’ve done a fantastic job of putting a quick little shock into my day. I’d love to see this stretched out to a feature length piece, and anyone who digs a good Japaneseghost story is going to be totally enamored with this little shocker.
The Screenhead Ten Scale joins in my applause and hands The Final Boy an eight out of ten for being a great but really short blast of creepy.