A Night of Horror twisted shorts

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Horrorphile - April 2009

F**KED-UP SHORT FILMS for the SERIOUSLY TWISTED

April 3rd 2009 02:58

Loma Lynda: The Red Door Iglesias Estefania

A Night of Horror international film festival here in Sydney is wrapping up for the third year in a row. Work commitments meant I couldn’t see all the features I wanted, but most of the ones I did catch were excellent. Also of note were the 60 odd short movies programmed throughout the ten-day festival. Along with the requisite one or two shorts which accompanied most of the features were four mini-programmes; including animation, Ozploitation and last night’s selection affectionately named "Fucked Up People Doing Fucked Up Things".

The mini-programmes were a bit of a lucky dip. Let’s face it, many filmmakers never make the transition from short film to feature-length movie, simply because the movies they make are crap and they’ll never find the funding to make a feature, unless they’re Uwe Boll. Or they fund the feature entirely themselves.

Amongst the flotsam and jetsam of the short film industry are some real gems. The festival directors for A Night of Horror found quite a few. There’s a real skill involved in making a short film, much more so than your average Joe realises. Most important of all is pacing. A short film, as a rule, should be short. There are few exceptions (AM1200 being one of them). Too many filmmakers make the mistake of trying to expand a short film idea into something that breaches the narrative capacity of the screen story they’re trying to tell. Ten or minutes into the film and the narrative is already wandering, the rhythm has slipped, and the audience are rolling their eyes and wondering what they hell kind of self-indulgent wank they’re subjecting themselves to. I’m starting to ramble myself.

There were seven short films in the "FUPDFUT" mini-programme, four of which took my twisted fancy. The first one, Excision (2008), written and directed by Richard Bates Jr. featured a terrific central performance from Tessa Ferrer as a seriously deluded teenager who fantasizes about being a surgeon and dreams of sensual horror. Okay, so it was 18-minutes long, but it paced well, was laced with a fantastic streak of black humour, and had a surprisingly poignant finish.

This Is A Story About Ted And Alice (2008), directed by Teressa Tunney, had film school funding and so sported good cinematography and more professional performances. It wasn’t paced particularly well, but it had a great sense of dark comedy. It was the date from hell as an extroverted young man Ted (Dominic Fumusa) is taken back to the homestead by his much older date Alice (Melissa Leo) and subsequently terrorized by her daddy (Malachy McCourt) and junior brother (Jason Blaine).

The last two shorts hit delightfully hard. These were not for the squeamish or faint-hearted or easily offended. Sandik (2007), written and directed by Turkish filmmaker Can Evrenol was a nasty piece of social satire and the audience lapped it up. A young boy (Erencan Eren) with a fixed expression is pulling a chest behind him along the street. He enters the gate of a home (his own??) and in front of the gathered family takes a baby out of the chest and proceeds to tear the baby’s head apart. The family members reaction appears to be on e of self-destruction.

The last film screened was possibly one of the most excruciating films I’ve had to sit through. Not because it wasn’t well made, on the contrary, it was made extremely well. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Julien Zenier’s Snip (2008) pushed boundaries of self-inflicted violence and gore to new levels, or should I say new depths. These Spaniards are really delivering the horror goods these days. A bald man (Zoe Berriatúa) is watching television in his darkened living room apartment. He surfs between news, soap, porn, back and forth, the effect becoming stultifying. Then he has a better idea. Stripping naked he sets up a video camera to film himself, takes a sharp box-cutter knife, and proceeds to slice into his forearm, cutting off a huge thick strip of flesh. The audience gasped as the special effects make-up looked disturbingly real. This wasn’t CGI either. The man continues by cutting huge chunks from his chest, slicing into his face and the top of his head. The ten-minute film finishes with the mutilated man fetching a glass of water (thirsty work indeed!).

Hats off to Gorka Aguire, the special effects technician for some of the most extraordinary prosthetic work I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen some pretty impressive stuff in my time). I noted special thanks were given to Nacho Cerdà, the boundary-pushing director of the shorts Aftermath (1994) and Genesis (1998) and the under-rated The Abandoned (2006). There’s no doubt any serious hardgore horrorphile could not be impressed with this SFX showcase show-stopper. An uber-slick “snuff” flick.

Two shorts screened before last night’s extreme feature I'll Never Die Alone (2008). The first was the awesome Loma Lynda: The Red Door, which is described by its writer/director Jason Bognacki as “a modern giallo genre film; a blood-drenched psychological mystery told through the distorted gaze of Fabi who fantasies two younger versions of herself, Loma and Lynda; heroines trying to atone Fabis’ tragic past. The Red Door is a modern novella, not quite a short story and not quite a novel, but definitely a modern giallo story.”

A giallo as interpreted by David Lynch is the way I saw it. A sensational visual style; beautiful floating camerawork, a beautiful brunette (Iglesias Estefania) with smeared mascara, a hideous ageing psychopath (Daivd Fine), deep lush reds and yellow art direction, a retro-fitted hotel room, soft jazz-lounge soundtrack juxtaposed against the nightmarish schizophrenic scenario. It was a mesmerizing cinematic experience that swayed like a sensual dream gone awry. The dark underbelly dream of Tinseltown exposed, stabbed with a switchblade and burst like a bubble. There appears to be a 40-minute version, and additionally a feature-length version is in production. I'm very excited!

Finally, Fetal (2009), a black and white surrealist piece of post-modern feminist horror, written and directed by Antonio Falcon, that owed more than a little to David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1976). Sebastian Bales plays a young woman whose mind doesn’t like the fact that she’s pregnant. This one guaranteed everyone squirmed and at short film's end winced very hard.

Here's the trailer to Snip:

Here's a teaser trailer to Loma Lynda: The Red Door:

Here's a teaser to the 40-minute version:

And here's a teaser to the feature-length movie:

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Posted By: Bryn - Category: movie reviews

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Comments

7 Comments. [ Add A Comment ]

Comment by Lady Henrietta Muddling

April 3rd 2009 03:49

Potter in a Harry

Bryn,

It's nice of you to write a post just for me.

Comment by Bryn

April 3rd 2009 04:31

Horrorphile

Lady David, small mercies, have a fucked-up weekend dude

Comment by Damo

April 3rd 2009 05:05

Snip?
It would have been better if you said that he ate the flesh afterward.

However it does look like a test of ones mind.

Comment by Bryn

April 4th 2009 07:18

Horrorphile

Damo, Snip tested my boundaries of what I can endure to watch, and that's saying something. Very impressive filmmaking because as far as I can tell it was all done in-camera (ie prosthetics and clever camera angles. The cinemtagraphy, music and editing were all excellent, as were the title and end credit sequences. Not sure where on earth you'll ever see the complete ten-minute movie though. Oh yes, it tests the mind alright.

Comment by Damo

April 4th 2009 09:44

Bryn

I think it is one of those movies that I may not enjoy. Empathy is a curse that I must carry.

Comment by Anonymous

April 5th 2009 03:59

10 minutes of Loma Lynda: The Red Door appears on the Provocateur DVD Experiments In Terror 3.

It's the best ten minutes of horror I've seen in a very long time. Absolutely recommended.

Comment by Bryn

April 5th 2009 22:23

Horrorphile

Anon, only ten minutes? That's shorter than the 16-min version I saw ... I wanna see the 40-minute and feature length versions! Thanks for the heads-up though.

[ Previous - Ai No Corrida (In The Realm Of The Senses) ]

[ Next - No Moriré Sola (I’ll Never Die Alone) ]

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