The film “Nightmare before Christmas” from Tim Burton was a movie that I hadn’t seen in a very, very long time. However, watching these films brought me back to the same time and place that I was curled up as a little girl gawking at the pint-size three dimensional figures that were creep-tacular in the sense that they had distorted faces, unnatural movement and otherwise defied natural human form. Nature of fact-ly speaking, the films appealed to me as a mash-up between Pixar’s Monsters Inc and both of Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows and Nightmare before Christmas. Then add a splash of Despicable Me minions. Hell, we can probably throw in some of Willy Wonka’s oompa lompas.
Pica Towers is nostalgic of Disney Pixar's Despicable Me and Ghastly Hollows.
The first film Good News is in dire need of a new title. Maybe “Spook-tacular Supreme”, “Devilish Acrobats” or something down those lines. The film opened with a highly unconventional shot, which indicated to the viewer that the object of interest was not designed for perception in a humane and natural way. Most likely because this figure is ominous, and conspicuously sends shriek of terror along the spine. Creepy, shakes head. However, the headliner emerged in the frame before that with two round pits of bright light shining through a pitch-black atmosphere. This dissolution of light evokes an uneasy and hollowing effect on the viewer because as humans, we instinctively fear immense shadows and darkness. What was especially chilling to me was the shot of the minion being jolted up in a pulley, and how it rigidly bounced about while in somewhat slow motion. The closing shot was both sad and perfectly evil that the bible-bot collapsed at the front door with a knife in his back. It remained the only scene to climax the film, and its delivery somewhat startled me. In many ways, the death of the bible-carrying bot was metaphorical to crucification and the prosecution of Christians.
The second film, Hounds of Flesh was undeniably unsettling. The opening consists of a blind man strolling and his dog trailing behind him. Immediately, we see that all objects are consistent in their stature: cubical, ominous, black and white with shades of gray and figures with no clearly defined faces. The dog leads the man down the stairs but not before jetting off with the blind man’s cane in mouth. At this point in the film, I feared the blind man awkwardly stumbling down the rigid and under-lit staircase. There was a consistent use of panning, for the opening shot and for the behind the alley shots as well. The video effectively upped scare tactics by imposing under the face shots of the blind man and over-the-head shots that conspicuously showed the top of the towers that surrounded him. The most unnerving shot in this film, however was off the dog after he placed the cane beside the dog house, and the flicker of light behind him which displayed a man dangling from the ceiling by a fine rope.
The third and last film I observed was Pizza Sangre, which more notably possessed more of a storyline and plot, if it can be called that. The opening shot of the radar over head what appeared to be the pizza man alluded the audience that the pizza man was being observed, or indicative of this case, targeted. The film then broke into a behind shot of the pizza man with a clear view of the clouded sky, whirling and gnarling. The pizza man then walked off into the distance far from the viewer, until he finally collapsed. I was otherwise unaware of what had happened to him until the shot peered to a boy in the utmost high level of the tower appeared to have fired his shotgun and killed the man. At this point, the boy is scolded by his mother. The last scene was of a stray dog devouring the undelivered pizza. So, where does this dog come from out of this desolate wasteland of wilderness? Weird?!
Overall, the technique employed by these Studio AKA producers were effective in giving the viewers “boo” for thought. However, I believe these shorts might have been far more thrillingly cultivated if they were paired with more developed narratives.