One of the few ultrashorts I have seen on IMDb that's truly worth watching. There are no schlitzy gimmicks, no stupid overly done makeup jobs, no addicts sucking down or shooting up licit or illicit drugs, no buckets of blood splashed across the screen, nothing whatsoever unrealistic --and by "unrealistic" I don't mean total lack of any need to suspend disbelief on some point but a running series of idiotic or sheer "that's won't happen anywhere but in some schlock writer's mind" events. I like movies and books requiring a reasonable suspension of disbelief --Tolkien's other races are not of the real world, but they hold up in consistency; vampires and werewolves don't exist in this world, but any story using such characters in a modern setting can be very good if the writer avoids also using (for sheer convenience or as part of the equally incapable artist's pantheon of "no limits") unrealistic stupidity like "Oh, they use sunscreen so they can walk around in daylight with no trouble"....
This 6 minute film, however, doesn't even require a reasonable suspension of disbelief. I'd recommend NOT watching it if you have young children and lose sleep over real world horrors getting them. Without showing more than a shoe and a pair of hands, without recording more than a couple of gasp and a closing door or two over the entire course of the movie, the writer follows the oldest and best rule in the book: Let their imagination fill it in, because NOT seeing it leaves room for everything that's more horrific than anything you can show them. The old movie makers knew this well, with so much that was awful occurring off screen or perhaps in silhouette at most. The modern convention of extreme explicit gore, violence, sex, etc, merely results in the increasing desensitization of a totally jaded audience.
I would like to see more of Tate Lown's work, but not for a little while. I have to recover from the impact of this really frightening little gem first!
This 6 minute film, however, doesn't even require a reasonable suspension of disbelief. I'd recommend NOT watching it if you have young children and lose sleep over real world horrors getting them. Without showing more than a shoe and a pair of hands, without recording more than a couple of gasp and a closing door or two over the entire course of the movie, the writer follows the oldest and best rule in the book: Let their imagination fill it in, because NOT seeing it leaves room for everything that's more horrific than anything you can show them. The old movie makers knew this well, with so much that was awful occurring off screen or perhaps in silhouette at most. The modern convention of extreme explicit gore, violence, sex, etc, merely results in the increasing desensitization of a totally jaded audience.
I would like to see more of Tate Lown's work, but not for a little while. I have to recover from the impact of this really frightening little gem first!
