Sunday at Wasteland is more reserved. As we did last time, we checked out the short film festival. I love shorts. You get a good taste of a whole bunch of people's talents (or lack thereof) in a short amount of time. The shorts shown were:
Mondo Schlocko (2010)
Never a Bride (2011)
Hell Week (2011)
Monster of Mad Mooney's Lake (2011)
The Last Broadcast (2011)
Swirlee (2000)
Of those, Hell Week was well-made, Monster was pretty fun and Swirlee was excellent. Swirlee was directed by and starred James Lorinz, who plays a man with a soft-serve ice cream cone for a head.
One more circuit around the dealer room to pick up a couple DVDs and prints and then we were done. It's always disappointing going back to the real world -- where very few people walk around with Pinhead on their T-shirt -- when these cons are over. Sigh.
The Haunting (2009) directed by Elio Quiroga
No, not that The Haunting, this is a Spanish movie originally called No-Do that's a part of the Fangoria Frightfest series. Basically, mix in some The Sixth Sense with a bit of The Exorcist and, yes, The Haunting and you'll get something like this film. Though not terribly original, at least it also mixes in some local flavor with the use of old "No-Do" films. These were newsreels created by the Franco dictatorship as propaganda. Those shown in this film center around a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary three children see. Half a century later, postpartum-depressed Francesca and her family move into the house where the Virgin appeared and things begin to go bump in the night.
As with all of these ghost story movies, the haunting get progressively worse, dark secrets from the past are revealed, and then the monster is defeated at the end. There's nothing shocking here, other than the fact that the family doesn't move the hell out of the house at the first sign of spookiness. (5/10)
No comments:
Post a Comment