05 April, 2011

WI Film Festival 2011: Saturday Night Shorts @ The Chazen

Saturday night we took in a series of shorts at the Chazen which has a distinctly dark bent to them.





First up was Jeremy Hosterman's The Great Work of Dr. D. Volos Tinkerpaw. Looking like an avuncular Aleister Crowley, Tinkerpaw works away in his laboratory and summons a demon for an assistant. Then he concocts a potion to raise the dead. The first test subject is success and the reanimated man is happy to play his violin for the good Doctor. Tinkerpaw uses himself as the second test subject...

As the program notes, The Great Work of Dr. D. Volos Tinkerpaw is certainly Méliès-inspired. Most of the color has been bled out and the camera merely acts as the fourth wall for the beginning of the movie before finally moving into the action. The ragtime piano is the perfect accompaniment to this good-natured tribute to the genesis of motion pictures.





Next up was Love Me Tender. It begins innocently enough with a young girl named Emma making a Valentine's Day card for a boy on whom she has a crush. Emma lovingly eyes the boy across the playground when another girl sits down with him. After she leaves Emma presents the boy with her card and begins lecturing him on the role of the tongue in French kissing. They lock lips and young Emma comes away with a bloody mouth and the boy's tongue in her mouth.

Many years later Emma is in college and a brief encounter with a classmate, Ben, leaves her obsessed with him. They go out on a date where Emma discovers Ben is not at all the man she thought he was. This leads to a rather bloody end to their first date.

Although the fake blood flew here, Love Me Tender was pretty funny. For instance, in one scene Emma is livid that Ben hasn't yet called her. He's outside at night and Emma stealthily comes up behind him to exact her revenge just as he calls her. She is forced to scramble into hiding as her phone goes off. The cinematography was really nice with crisp images and good use of low-angle lighting to cast huge shadows.





Dark Ways followed. Unlike the first couple efforts, this one didn't try to have a light-hearted side or inject any humor into the proceedings.

As the movie opens Emma is in the back seat of her father's car and she is reading Frightening Fables. She and her dad are going to his brother's house to clean it out for Emma's uncle, an occult anthropologist, has died. While rummaging through boxes, Emma comes upon a Magic 8 Ball. That night she hears strange noises.

The next day her father finds some foul-smelling black goo on a heat register grate. Poking around the basement he discovers a room where is brother practiced black magic. For her part, Emma begins to sense a presence in the house that may very well be malicious...

Director William Q. Hartin builds methodically builds the suspense over the course of the movie's brief running time to a climax which had members of the audience gasping. To his credit, Hartin never opens the door and instead allows the imagination of the viewer abetted by some tense moments to do all the work. E.g. - Emma consults the Magic 8 Ball and so there is this repetition of suspenseful moments as we wait for the little triangle to appear and give the answer we were hoping it wouldn't.

Dark Ways is a loving homage to The Shining right down to the soundtrack which uses Ligeti's Lontano and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by Bartók just like Kubrick did. While the movie is only 27 minutes long, Hartin used every second perfectly to build suspense and give us in the audience a good fright.

For some reason the guy sitting next to me at one point grabbed my attention and began whispering a numerology lesson into my ear. The house in the movie had the address of 1633. He pointed out that the sum of those numbers was 13 and that 1+3=4. It was day 4 in the movie so he just knew something bad was going to happen.





After such wonderful movie, SHC really had its work cut out for it.

Sweeney rushes home to his girlfriend in a panic. He went to a fortune teller earlier that day only to be told that he will undergo SHC – Spontaneous Human Combustion – that night at 7PM sharp. Cathy doesn't believe him but eventually comes round after another of the gypsy's predictions proves to be accurate.

SHC is fast-paced with lots of cuts. The conceit is that Sweeney gets home at quarter to seven and the movie is 15 minutes long so it more or less plays out in real time. The dialogue is rapid-fire which ratchets up the tension. I just wish there was a bit more of it. The movie fell just shy of critical mass for me. Still, it was a thrill to watch.





Greg likes to traipse through a cemetery on his way to the office each morning. Today he notices a new tombstone for an unknown soul that has the same birthdate as he does and that day's date for the poor person's demise.

So opens Rigor Mortis.

Greg falls asleep at his desk and awakens at night. Most of the office lights are off and there is seemingly nobody around until he hears screams and finds himself being chased before discovering his own body in a bathroom stall. Suddenly rigor mortis sets in and Greg is unable to move his fingers.

A fun little take on “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”.





The penultimate short that night was Pesticide. It concerns a nameless man who works for a pest control company and has a preternatural obsession with legs, specifically those of cockroaches. The camera closes in tight as we watch the man snip off the their legs and collect them in a jar. One evening he is watching the LA sunset from an overpass. Turning away he trips on the curb and falls over. Slowly he crawls over and inside his van where he proceeds to remove his baroque clockwork false leg.

While certainly creepy on its own, Pesticide's five minute running time would probably work better as an introduction to a longer narrative.





I have to admit feeling really old after having watched the last of the night's movies, Ellen. Embarrassing details to follow.

The young Ellen loses a tennis match and afterwards her mother expresses her disappointment. She gets up and leaves. We then hear a comforting male voice say “Hello there” and see a nondescript gentleman coming home to his lovely old home. He carries his bag of groceries into the kitchen and begins to heat a can of soup laced with some kind of powder.

And this is where I felt really old. The guy's house is this big, old place with lots of wood trim and vaulted ceilings. I noticed that the windows of his kitchen are enormous and feel embarrassed when I catch myself thinking, “Wow! That place must cost a fortune to heat.” Back to the story.

However harmless this guy looks, he is anything but. Upstairs poor Ellen is tied to a bed. But she recalls more of that conversation with her mother which involved the incredible disappearing soup can act. Luckily for Ellen, soup cans these days have pull tops and don't require a can opener. With the lid she is able to cut the rope securing her to the bed and effect an escape but not before leveling her kidnapper with a tennis racket to the head.

I really enjoyed Ellen as it did a great job of keeping me in suspense over the fate of our imperiled heroine.

But the night belonged to Dark Ways which was likely due to its longer running time which gave it more room to induce the creeps and, for me personally, some music which I already associated with another incredibly scary film.

Still, there wasn't a clunker to be had Saturday night.

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