Little generic but well shot short about a guy who scores a vintage jack-in-the-box toy that is haunted by something murderous that lures him and his chick out of bed that night...
Good atmosphere and lighting. Kudos to the crisp production values for an apparent budget of only 2,000 bucks. The premise consists of your basic horror conventions, but works well in this capacity as a 'spooky' short film with a nice gory jolt at the end.
Not bad.
Directed by: Nick Everhart
Runtime: 5 minutes
Forklift Driver Klaus - First Day on the Job (2000)
Was actually going to do this one last time, but somehow it managed to slip my mind. That's fine, cuz it gave me an excuse to watch it again.
Pretty much everyone's familiar with this German splatter short - chronicling the disastrous first day of a warehouse employee in the 'style' of a corporate training video. A series of deadly accidents take place as a result of Klaus' safety violations, no matter how minor. By the end, limbs are flying, people are cut in half and so on.
Fun stuff. It actually looks like a legit workplace safety video despite the gore, which is cheezy as hell, but laughably entertaining and clever. If you're one of the few who hasn't seen this one, track it down!
Directed by: Jörg Wagner & Stefan Prehn
Runtime: 10 minutes
Jabberwocky (1971)
aka. Žvahlav aneb šatičky slaměného Huberta - This is definitely one of Jan Švankmajer's strongest, most impressive shorts I have seen. It's based on Lewis Carroll's 1871 poem having to do with the Alice in Wonderland saga and by that I mean it contains the poem read in voice-over at the beginning. The remainder of the film is a cavalcade of surreal stop-motion animation, involving dolls, clothes, knives, furniture, etc - in typically hypnotic Švankmajer fashion.
If 'trippy' animation is your thing, check this out out as well as all of the other Czech film-maker's shorts and features.
Directed by: Jan Švankmajer
Runtime: 14 minutes
Tom Thumb in the Land of the Giants (1999)
This Nick Zedd short plays out like a bizarre movie trailer - showing a kid running around a cemetery - being pursued by figures in gas masks, holding severed limbs. A fiendish voice-over impalpably explains the hellish scenario as it cuts to a one armed guy and ends with the kid crawling in a giant woman's vagina...
"Tom Thumb in the Land of Giants" is quite obviously played for laughs in its absurdity, which makes it a reasonably enjoyable, quick watch.
Directed by: Nick Zedd
Runtime: 4 minutes
Night Pastor (1998)
This is easily Alex Chandon's least memorable short. It's done in the style of a grindhouse movie trailer for a fictional feature called "Night Pastor", about a gun-toting Las Vegas minister. He jerks off in confessional booths and savagely beats a homeless guy to death before pissing on him...
None of the imagination or creative gore FX of Chandon's other shorts. I got the feeling this one was pretty much slapped together on the fly. Check out "Bad Karma" or even "Chainsaw Scumfuck" for a better (and gorier...) example of his work.
Directed by: Alex Chandon
Runtime: 9 minutes
38/79: Sentimental Punk (1979)
Kren's films are either mildly interesting or downright stupid and "38/79: Sentimental Punk" would be placed in the category of the latter. I have absolutely no idea what this was supposed to be.
All it shows is choppy, fast-motion crowd footage, seemingly looped with no sound at all. I have no idea where it was or what was going on...
I guess some would find it "artistic". I find it to be a typically pretentious piece of 'experimental' shit, courtesy of Kren.
Directed by: Kurt Kren
Runtime: 5 minutes
Sittin' Pretty (1992)
Second part of a two-film animated series that may be the greatest fucking pair of animation shorts ever produced. Baby Elmo and Mr. Olaf first appeared in a fucked up lil' 1989 short, named "Quiet Please", and they return in this slightly more slickly animated toon, "Sittin' Pretty" (not even sure why it's called that...).
Mr. Olaf shows up at the door in drag - disguised as a babysitter - who is left with the adorable infant, Baby Elmo. Olaf immediately shoots the baby in the head and hangs it from a coat rack. He then exclaims, "I'm fuckin' starvin'!" and goes rummaging through the kitchen, only coming up with an endless supply of "fuckin' baby food!". He gets the brilliant idea to chop the dead Baby Elmo up with a machete, grind some of his limbs in a meat grinder and stick the rest in the blender to make his pulverized body into a pie and eat it. The mother comes back, Olaf flees and the mother eats the pie.
Awesome shit! Not as funny as "Quiet Please", but definitely more offensive. I wish Michael Grimshaw had done WAY more of these back in the day. Truly classic. Look for another animated short he did back in the early '90s called "Deep Sympathy", in which a priest fucks a corpse during a funeral. Fantastic!
Directed by: Michael Grimshaw
Runtime: 2 minutes
Honey, I'm Going to Ride My Bicycle (2008)
A guy tells his chick he's going on a bike ride and will be back before dinner. A while later, he comes crawling up the stairs to their apartment with the bicycle seat painfully wedged deep in his anus. His panic-stricken girl tries to pull it out by the bar, but only the bar and a length of his intestines is successfully extracted...
Funny little gross out short, clearly made on a nothing budget and just for a goof. Also, anything involving torn assholes gets my personal stamp of approval.
Directed by: Mirte Eggenkamp & Maarten Prins
Runtime: 5 minutes
Boo (1932)
The best way to describe "Boo" is basically as being the Rifftrax of 1932.
Some silly-voiced tool does some voice-over narration for "Frankenstein" (1931) and "Nosferatu" (calling it "Dracula"...) that is suppose to be funny. It's not. Maybe for the time it was, but it's incredibly weak, cheesy humor and considerably hard to follow for the most part. The guy talks too fast and his wise cracks and puns rarely make any sense.
Pretty lame...
Directed by: Albert DeMond
Runtime: 9 minutes
Alexia (2013)
Yeah, horror flick about a haunted Facebook page - big whoop. Not my thang, but for 9 minutes of my time and a decent wrap-up I'll give "Alexia" it's dues.
This Spanish short is about a guy who broke up with a girl who ended up killing herself. He keeps tabs on her Facebook and her lovelorn ghost decides to haunt him on her birthday...
It's a well shot little movie and the googly-eyed ghost FX at the end were kinda cool. However, I wasn't too 'into' the - now outdated - "Grudge"-inspired imagery. Still, like I said, for the length and a fairly spooky vibe, it's worth checking out.
Directed by: Andrés Borghi
Runtime: 9 minutes
Thanks for reading. Until next time...
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