Since I have a limited about of energy, a huge amount of things to write, and, apparently, a very anxious audience I will be posting reviews of the films I saw in an episodic manner (most likely defined by the order in which I saw them). I will also be including reviews of films that I have seen over the weekend, but not at the fest including the shorts on Blood Drive II and Short Kutz. (They will be appropriately marked should you care to seek them out.) Everytime you see "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor" as a post title it means reviews of films will follow.


A Public Service Announcement by Brian Forrest
This short film is a tribute to what a filmmaker can do with just one average looking guy, a chair, and a sick sense of humor. PSA is about a young yuppified man proclaiming his love of cannibalism in the minimalist style of an actual public service announcement. Actually, the quality of the movie is above that of the average PSA.


PSA is not actually scary. As Tony Timpone and Tim Hinsley, who provide commentary on Blood Drive II claim, in any horror festival/compliation DVD you have to include some comedy. The fusion of comedy and horror is pretty well established, and as Timpone and Hinsley claim comedy is often far harder to pull off than horror. In addition, the inclusion of comedy, whether it be sarcastic commentary or gory slapstick, is potentially damaging. Horror writers have the difficult job of making potentially ridiculous situations believable enough for an audience to buy. Think of the premise of your favorite horror film-a guy who kills people in dreams, a videotape that kills you, body snatchers, human immortal leeches. It's easy to see how an audience could reject such premises as ridiculous. The inclusion of comic relief can make the viewers see the entire film as simply ludicrous rather than relieving dramatic tension.


PSA is simply a well put together short with a rather dark sense of humor, but I'm sad I couldn't find the director or any information about the short because it was a great way to kick off the Fest. Hopefully it will be included in a compilation DVD somewhere.


Culinary Art by B.C. Furtney


Furtney has another short on the Blood Drive II DVD entitled Disposer, which I actually thought was far more effective than Culinary Art. On the other hand, the Fest organizers tried, when possible, to pair shorts together. In this case the pairing of Culinary Art with PSA gave away Furtney's twist-that the young attractive woman making her date dinner is actually making her date INTO dinner. Furtney seems to favor stories in which young sexy women have some seriously strange hang-ups. For example, Disposer features a bored young man calling a sexphone line only to find his dream girl has a very kinky idea of phone sex. I don't want to give away the ending but if you watch it you will never be able to hear the question "Do you know where my hand is?" without getting a little squemish.


Furtney's films are kind of like the Man Show version of horror. The young women in his films often end up half clad blithely smiling as they are hosed with blood in the same way that Sports Illustrated models are showered in water in slow motion. Both Disposer and Culinary Art feature the same kind of dark humor in which men entering into fairly pedestrian/predictable dating situations suddenly find themselves facing extraodinarily violent women. The women in these two films are highly sexualized embodiments of 2 different stereotypical female roles. In Disposer, we find the sex crazed nymphomaniac-living only to satisfy male desire. In CA, the woman has embraced the more traditional homemaker role, but her outfit is also very sexy.

The images used in these films unites violence and sexuality. The garbage disposal, a feature of every kitchen-the female domain, is very vaginal-an expression as the Freudians might say of castration anxiety-but also an inversion of the usual sex roles as it is a woman's hand-phallic-entering a female vessel (disposal). In CA, the homemaker asks her hapless victim if he would prefer a "leg" or "breast" a play on the idea of being a "leg" or "breast" man. Since she is the one who is the intended, uh, recipient, she has taken on the male role of making decisions based on an objectification of the body.


Furtney's other films Mister Eryams and Perfect also feature sexy twisted women, but they are more quiet pictures-going for creepy rather than goretastic guffaws (I can't believe I just wrote that). Definately worth seeing.


More to come...