Watching a block of short films back-to-back is easily one of my favorite things-- it's why I spend so much time on youtube. That experience is made even better when watching the films on a large screen...and especially when watching Ceiling Finger.
I watched film block 2 and really enjoyed most of the presented films-- the variety of styles and genres helped keep the momentum when changing stories so rapidly. Overall, When Perri Met Aly was probably my favorite. I love the Drunk History-style of recreating a story told in an interview, and the different methods of recreation (shooting on-location, projected backdrops, having shadows of actors cast on a sheet) added some nice variety. I also loved Frogboy and Ceiling Finger. When the girl who made Frogboy (which was like 20 seconds long) said it took her 5 weekends of staying up until 5 in the morning to finish, I thought “yes...you know my struggle.”
I attended the second conference block, and those presentations were also pretty cool. I particularly enjoyed “The Image Of Latin America In 70s Exploitation Cinema,” as I’ve always loved watching exploitation cinema-- mostly cannibal-related and blaxploitation films. It was interesting to have their productions put in context-- finding out how these films and their producers profited off the media obsessing over snuff films, why they portrayed Latin America as a lawless hell on earth, etc. The recent “affectionate parodies” of exploitation films (Black Dynamite, Machete, Machete Kills, and soon Machete Kills in Space) are fun to watch, but I don’t know of many modern horror films that pay homage to or get a lot of inspiration from movies like Cannibal Holocaust or Eaten Alive!. I suppose it may be harder now to distribute an intensely gory/violent film to a wide audience. I’d settle for some movies in the spirit of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive -- super gory, but to the point of ridiculousness.
