Shriekfest: Day 7

Posted by Robert Fure (robert@filmschoolrejects.com) on October 14, 2006

Another short, another feature, another day. Word.

Faceless (http://www.igenfilms.com/)

Official Synopsis: Cynthia Navarro is an artist obsessed with the beauty of the human body. When she finds a homeless man lying in the street, she discovers more than just a man.

So there’s an artist. Her stuff is ok. She finds a bum. Takes him in, cleans him, sedates him, kills him, casts his body parts and sells it as art. The flyer for this said it was disturbing and gruesome and all this stuff. Not so. It was fairly tame. We find out she has done this more than once, about 11 or 12 times to be exact.

For some reason an old Jewish couple really likes her art and buys a hand cast in bronze. She gets away with it and keeps doing what she’s always done. It was pretty boring, nothing too exciting here. This film obviously wanted to be American Psycho but failed in every way of it’s attempted theft. The acting was ok, and the plot was fairly weak and was aiming for that “look how disturbing this is and she’s so cavalier about it and she is high brow and obviously this is really good.”

Pass.

Final Grade: D+

Desperation (http://www.departmentofpublicentertainment.com/)

After a rough car accident, a young woman is stuck in her car. The only people who hear her cries are two sadistic teenagers who set about playing a game of torture the girl. She manages a cell phone call out to the 911 dispatcher, but can the Sheriff’s Deputy get there in time? And if so, does he stand a chance?

Of course he does, these are two dumb weirdo teenagers. The movie was actually pretty good. It was clearly low budget, in the few thousand range (under 9000 I’d bet) and had the look of a student film. The acting was par for the course. I didn’t buy these two teenagers as the kinds of people who could do this, or have any success despite them saying this isn’t the first time. They seemed vastly inept.

An ok time if you literally have nothing else to do but breathe, but don’t search it out and if anything remotely interesting comes up, you should probably just cut and run. You wont miss much. But I’m sure they got an A in class.

Final Grade: C

| | Read more articles by Robert Fure