Shortly After Dark

On Saturday, I checked out the Shorts After Dark feature, where the Afterdark festival showcases it's international shorts program.

United Monster Talent Agency

The first short has some director cameos and a lot of good makeup and costume work. It's based around the golden era of monster movies at Universal. We see real life monsters working out of a talent agency. It's not very funny, though it looks good.

The Thomas Beale Cipher

This is only the first segment of a full animated story the director wants to make, and I really want to see the rest of it. The animation is hard to describe. It's like cutouts and textures and is very ...cubist? It looked really good to me, and worked well with the tense scenario. A scientist is trying to elude the FBI while trying to solve a famous puzzle. A man going by Thomas Beale apparently hid some gold and disappeared leaving behind only a note with various numbers on it which have puzzled cryptologists for decades. (Or more) We don't actually get to solving the mystery in this first part, which is why my appetite was only whetted. This story was intriguing, tense, and funny. I'll see if I can dig it up later for you to see it.

Premiere Contacte

A man in an apartment rigged up to look like a spaceship, (Well, in the context of the film it is a ship) attempts to make first contact with aliens. the aliens are women, and first contact looks a lot like getting laid. This short is also simple but funny.

Frank Dancoolio: Paranormal Drug Dealer

This short was extremely manic and cartoony. Almost too much so. But it was also very funny. Ace reporter Holly Malone, (Who acts like a reporter from the first half of the 20th century) tracks down Frank Dancoolio who she suspects is responsible for various drug related deaths in futuristic Neo-Mega-Ultra Tokyo. Wierd visuals and some great lowbrow humour make this a lot of fun despite it's over-the-top presentation.

Barcelona Venice

A simple bit where a business man stumbles through wormholes in the earth. He discovers a conspiracy by airline companies to hide the knowledge of these wormholes. It's funny, but simple.

Off Season

Oh good christ. It was inevitable that somewhere here would be a genuine thriller. Not a parody, a trip, or genre film or something...fun like a silly gross-out flick. No, this time it was honest-to-god terror.

This is a UK/USA production that oddly enough is set in Canadian in some cottage country during the winter. The film starts with shots of family summer photographs and the sounds of children playing before showing us the frozen lake and shuttered cabins on a desolate landscape. A single man drags a pack around with his trusty dog. This thief steals from summer cottages during the wintry off-season. As he marches across the ice, he is led by his dog off to a large strange cabin.

"Don't go in there... no damn it, leave the dog! Damn it, you aren't listening! No, don't touch that!"

My favorite, this was extremely well directed and quite scary. It was mysterious and there's a clever sort of... appropriateness to the story. This is another one I want to dig up and show you if I can. Even writing about it right now makes me creeped out.

Pumzi

This African film was a budget sci-fi I guess. In the future, society lives indoors because of a lack of water and radiation damage. Power is supplied by people, and water is conserved a great deal. A scientist at the virtual natural history museum is sent a mysterious sample of soil which has great potential for growth. She defies her superiors and flees the society for the outdoors, travelling through the desert for the tree and nature she believes awaits her. Either she did find it, or the movie was metaphorically saying that mankinds sweat and tears are what it takes to rebuild the natural world. It depends on how literal what I saw was during the conclusion. Good either way.

One thing I didn't care for though was that the dialogue, (what little there was) was dubbed in with no one in the movie actually opening their mouths. Instead they would be typing on a computer, and we'd hear them talk as they communicated in this way. I guess this was done to avoid subtitles, but it seemed weird to me.

Demiurge Emesis

This was disappointing, not because it wasn't good. This three minute story was a narration by Danny Elfman (Not written by him though) about being an artist. The visual were grotesque and morbid stop motion animations where an artist was the black beast of Arrrrgh puking up gel and eating it, while critics were screaming skeleton chickens. The disappointment was that the first third played without sound, but was not rerun.

Deus Irae

This exorcism scenario stops looking serious when one of the priests walks in wearing shades. (Bia-con-dios) This is excellently put together with lots of grotesque effects. It looks like it could be a trailer for a great cult-action movie with a demon killing priest squad or something. Monster hands under a bed, creepy possessed doll heads, and a failed exorcist smeared on a ceiling are some of the highlights. Nasty, but very good too.

The Library

The showcase bizarrely concludes with the worst Marlon Brando themed video game the world has ever been exposed to. Watch this: