Lest you begin to think that all I do is blow intellectual sunshine up the skirts of would be indie directors, I thought it was time to include some of the films that were less than successful. Much, much less.


Close Your Eyes by David Lilley
I think the title of this short came from the director's initial instruction to the director of photography. Either that or it comes from the way the film is intended to be viewed. Essentially this film had two lighting schemes: dark and more dark. Occassionally I had a brief glimpse of what was going on, and I could almost hear the director saying off camera, "What are you crazy? I could almost see the action. Get so more dark up there." I'd like to comment on the story, but since I couldn't see enough to figure out what the hell was going on, I can't. This short wouldn't even work as a radio play.


The Predator's Return by Jerald Fine
No, not that predator although I think I would have been more amused by a pack of elderly people being terrorized by a guy in a rubber predator mask than I was by this film. The premise is intriguing: an elderly Holocaust survivor finds himself face to face with the Nazi who killed his family. The theme of aging and the fear of the loss of control associated with aging is usually confined to vampire films. Dan Cascarelli's Bubba-Hotep is a rare exception. Since a loss of control is one of the principle elements in fear, it is a shame that more scripts don't exploit this natural source of anxiety. Once the element of debilitating illness is paired with the horror of the Holocaust, it would seem a mixture destined to succeed. Afterall, what could be more terrifying than being trapped in a body that won't obey your will, unable to even communicate your fears, while living in close quarters with the man who killed your family and countless others?


In horseback riding we have a saying: put a mediocre rider on a good horse, and you'll see a mediocre performance; put a fabulous rider on a crappy horse, and you'll see a fabulous performance. To make that comment applicable here, it simply means give a great director a crappy script and crappy actors, and they'll still come up with a helluva film. Here a good story was given to a crappy director, and an annoyingly long short is the result.


The voiceover effectively killed this film. In the opening monologue, the character tells us no more than three times that he never forgets a face. OK we got it. And if the constant repetition wasn't bad enough, the inclusion of details that were already being conveyed visually, "I stared at him intensely", with that awful imitation German Jew accent was enough to make my trigger finger itchy. As the commentators on Blood Drive II say and low budget horror films like Saw illustrate, know your limitations and work within them. Here the only horror was watching this atrocity unfold while waiting for the ending credits.