The plot is as complex as you would expect (or desire) from a beer-based zombie film. A drunken brew master has embarrassed the brewery for the last time, being exiled to the lonely late-night shift. He hasn’t let this setback interrupt his drinking, and while looking into a vat of… OK, let’s not over think this. We all know that beer turns guys into zombies, right? That’s the plot. Done.

Co-writer/director Rob van der Velden approached internet fame with his winning entry into Quentin Tarantino’s fake trailer competition (Dutch edition), Nailed by Nikita. Fitting with the tone of the faux trailers in Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, Nailed by Nikita introduces the touching tale of an abused, often naked woman, with a nail gun. God how I love nail guns. Van der Velden upped his game, with help from de Voogd, for Zombeer, surpassing the production values of most genre features, as well as almost everything which airs on the SyFy Channel. The last is pertinent because Zombeer screened on that channel, and was also nominated for their Shocking Shorts Award.

I suppose you could find some political commentary here, or a statement about alcoholism, but my mind never wandered into the land of deep meanings while watching drunken zombies take a bite out of tourists. Sure, it’s hard to become emotionally involved as the film never picks a character to focus on. And yes, it could be a more complete story and less of what feels like an intro to a larger work. But it is already delivering zombies and beer. To ask for more would be ungrateful.

Since Zombeer could stand in for the definition of “guy” film (definitions with words in them are way too feminine), don’t watch it alone. The Super bowl is nearly upon us, another stereotypically masculine bit of entertainment. Set out a few twelve packs, and make sure you have at least a case of Dutch brews chilling. Order up a few pizzas, and before the big game, start off the afternoon with Zombeer. Nothing could be more fitting.

Since those days, this short has become sort of an online Halloween favorite, and it’s easy to see why.

As brisk as a nursery rhyme, The Cat with Hands is a twisted tale (so deliciously Grimm) about a well-dwelling cat that steals human body parts. That’s where the hands came from, see? Amazing how creepy the film manages to be just by attaching our normal limbs to the body of a household pet. Narrated by a single voice throughout, the story takes the shape of a freaky folk tale, and even has the campfire-style twist to go with it. This ghoulish concept originated from a recurring nightmare the director’s sister used to have when she was young, which stacks another evidence for children being the best source for all things messed-up.

Writer-director Robert Morgan’s experience with stop-motion animation is impressive, having also done a couple of really great grotesque shorts reminiscent of Brothers Quay (take a look at his Separation). Nowadays, it’s rare enough that stop-motion animation is used at all—unless your name rhymes with Schmenry Schmelick—let alone used as an effect. Funded by UK’s Channel 4, Morgan was able to shoot a portion of the film in stark 35mm live-action and a portion in stop-motion figures. The latter is specifically used to render the eponymous cat. It gives that side of the film an otherworldly effect: cartoony enough to be fantasy (which helps with hiding the revelation) but not so cartoony that it takes away from the spooky atmosphere.

Having been around for so long, The Cat with Hands may not be a discovery anymore, but it remains a favorite for its memorably simple creature and myth-like attribute—like a bedtime story that won’t go away.

If, unlike me, geeking out over art direction and animation styles is not your cup of tea, then Madame Tutli Putli might be an underwhelming experience. Not to be too harsh on the directors and writers Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski, the film is in almost cases engrossing and exhibits a fine grasp on the nuances of suspensful tension, but  its metaphorical journey is ultimately an unsatisfying head-scratcher, hinting at the edges of death and redemption, damnation and revelation, but ultimately not giving enough clues to support any interpretation. Despite that, the short, produced by the NFB, is one of the most remarkable claymation films yet achieved, perfectly instilling the desired mood and incorporating novel technical innovations.

The film follows its titular character as she boards a train, carrying along with her all her worldly possessions. The extremely expressive animation, of which more will be said, conveys her dejected and defeated demeanor. She is physically and metaphorically weighed down. The first hint that the film will lead you in unexpected directions though is included in this early scene, as Tutli Putli, bedecked in 1920’s garb and accoutrements, boards what appears to be a hyper-modern train.

Aboard the train Madame Tutli Putli surveys passengers around her, an eclectic bunch.  It is at this point that the film takes a startling turn. Madame Tutli Putli seems to flit back and forth between dream and reality, confronting demons that may be personal or external, and the mood and direction of the piece tilts towards suspenseful horror. A psychological parable? A stylistic thriller? Answers are left for the viewer to decide.

Well received in 2007 upon its release, the film has had its detractors. The incredible nuance of its look and movements have had many on the web crying, “uncanny valley!”. Personally I do not find this to be an apt critique, and the sheer fact of such a concept being applied to claymation(!) gives you a sense of the technical achievement of the film crew. Undoubtedly a major reason such feelings could ever arise has to do with the film’s most singular innovation, the compositing of actual actor’s eyes onto the clay models. Special Visual Effects artist Jason Walker was largely responsible for the technique’s development, and documents the process nicely on his website. As the NFB has done for many of its flagship projects, the film has an individual site that has a bevy of media that goes further into the creative process and behind the scenes. In the interviews those filmmakers certainly look worn down, I hope they got a good break after the 4 years of work this project took!

Oscar-nominated in 2007, many of you have likely gotten the chance to view the film previously, as it has been included in Cinema 16 and Wholphin collections, as well Magnolia Pictures Oscar Short Film screenings. the NFB has now brought it to the YouTube screening room, likely in honor of yet another probable Oscar-nom for this year, Cordell Barker’s Runaway. Madame Tutli Putli lost out on Oscar that year in spite of its audacious furthering of  claymation’s limits. The winner though was of course Suzie Templeton for Peter and the Wolf, maybe the most exciting practitioner of claymation in the short format today. Yeah, claymation is in a good place again.

Treevenge is a horror film, but it’s the kind of over-the-top splatterfest that elicits as many laughs as screams. We’re not talking Troll 2 laughs though. The self aware absurdity of the concept is matched only by the lovingly crafted odes to schlock and camp contained within. Like Kill Bill, the irony is outweighed by the awesome. Fans of old Raimi and Jackson blood-soaked horror films, a kinder if not gentler era of horror before the advent of torture-porn, will likely eat Treevenge up.

The film is a Christmas film, centering around the sadistic violence of the evergreen tree trade. The first half of the film depicts depraved, violent sorts of fellows gleefully chopping down trees. The trees cower and scream at the genocide, but are ultimately powerless in the face of the vicious aggressors. But even trees reach a tipping point and they will have their revenge. A gleefully gruesome revenge.

The Christmas spirit is consciously played up throughout the film, using music and effect treatments to artificially age the look and feel of the film so that it plays more like an annual institution—a horror version of Rudolph or Miracle on 34th Street I guess. The aging also connects the film to the older Grindhouse aesthetic, a hey-day of genre films that the film routinely references and which the previously alluded to Quentin Tarantino has recently helped to revive. There is a direct connection on this front—director Jason Eisener and the team at Yer Dead Productions got started with a winning entry for Robert Rodriguez’s  SXSW Grindhouse trailer competition, the similarly edgy Hobo With a Shotgun. The short played in front of screenings of Rodriguez’s and Tarantino’s Grindhouse double feature.

Congrats to the team at Yer Dead and Twitch for bringing Treevenge to the internet. I’m really curious about the details of this marriage. We used to think that this was how it would work for short film in the web age. Sites would buy web exclusivity agreements for short films for the sake of prestige and in order to drive traffic to their sites. The ease and ubiquity of the UGC sites though and the associated inability to protect digital video content was a deadly combo for web exclusivity of course. Just a week out from release Treevenge in already circulating YouTube.  We’re linking to Twitch though, with the hope that this kind of practice can be revived.

A young woman reflects upon a time 15 years earlier. She was 5 and her village was about to be set upon by English soldiers. In desperation, she crossed through the Black Forest, to search for a swordsman of legend, the “Kuroi Kenshin”, to help protect her family and people. Her only tool of persuasion is a book she hopes to give him.

That is the setup for the film, which at only 10 minutes, is still admirably able to establish a languid mood, only to be sharply shattered when the English finally do arrive. Omnipresent gloom, influenced by the dark pallete, and stylistic use of fog and other filters, helps as well to reinforce the dark, gothic meme. Religious overtones are meant to be imparted through the use of Schubert’s Ave Maria, but beautiful as it is, I found it to be found an almost laughable choice. Aside from mood and some nifty work with light, Comedy adheres rather closely to the traditional anime aesthetic, and is about as conventional a film you will see from the studio, known for its experimental work.  The action, which is brief, yet beautiful, is where the majority of the innovation can be witnessed, though simultaneous representations and ghostly afterimages. Sadly though it is the portion least suited to viewing on the ‘net.

Perhaps because it is one of the more straightforward entries in Studio 4°c’s catalog, Comedy has definitely become a fan-favorite. Of course maybe it is simply because of the well-established fact that mysterious and beautiful killing-machines are so deeply resonant with your average anime fan ^_^. Still the film has stood the test of time for a studio known as a bastion for short, experimental animation in Japan. It is a small studio, that by and large rejects growth, in order to create an environment that allows some of  the greatest animators to do the work they want to do. Commercial projects, such as major contributions to the Animatrix and the newer Gotham Knight collections, as well music videos for Linkin Park and the huge Japanese band, Glay, keep the studio in the black, but it is their short film collections that are the heart of their output. Collections like Genius Party, and the recent Genius Party Beyond, are the latest examples.

This is an important role the studio plays in term of the growth of animation in the country. Studio 4°c creates a space for animators, like Kazuto Nakazawa, to journey back and forth from the experimental to the mainstream.  The ironic thing about Japan is that the ubiquity of commercial animation, actually retards the experimental. Only in the last few years have Japanese animators like Koji Yamamura and yesterday’s Oscar-Winner, Kunio Kato, recieved recognition and validation on the world festival stage, and their work is by and large independent and does not really touch upon what we consider an anime aesthetic. Directors like Nakazawa on the other hand have a commercial output as diverse as directing the anime sequence in Kill Bill,  the Asience: Hairy Tale commercial, and chief animation directing of several episodes of Samurai Champloo. Comedy, is a worthy title in that oevre, and now with Youtube upping their quality, it has finally  been uploaded in a form fit to share. Enjoy it with the high-quality setting!

I’ve heard Jasper Morello described as a gothic horror, but there’s certainly a strong connection to science-fiction drawing from the genesis of the genre in the vein of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The sub-genre is a newer category, steampunk, which—for those unfamiliar with the term—is essentially a 19th century vision of the future where steam powers all. The allure is both a nostalgia for the Victorian-age aesthetic and a fascination with mechanics all set in a fantasy world with few limitations.

The unique style of animation is truly something to behold and reminiscent of the oldest surviving animated feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1927). The simplified characters are reduced to silhouettes diverting our attention from the character to the action in the background—intricate workings of steampunk machinery and soft, ethereal skyscapes. Lucas created the characters out of various found materials and shot them in stop-motion—the silhouette effect, he says, was the result of a “happy accident” when a light blew out. The machines and backgrounds were created with the aid of a 3D computer rendering and all was composited together to created a very seamless, very unique combination.

Jasper Morello ran the festival circuit a couple years back until it reached the pinnacle of short film—an Oscar nomination— where I saw it for the first time. It did so well, that Lucas has three more Jasper adventures in the works. If you’ve already seen this film, it’s a great second-viewing. If you haven’t yet seen it, you’re in for a real treat.

Post apocalyptical world – check
An underdog to root for – check
A bully to get his comeuppance – check
Kick-arsed girl to pine over – check
and, of course, Zombies!

The thing about ILSJ—co-written by Susser and David Michod—is that if you were to strip away the high production values and outlandish world setting, there’d still be at its core a touching age-old story of teen awkwardness in relating to the object of your desire that places our hero Jimbo in the shoes of Kevin Arnold or Dawn Wiener before him, it’s just that their obstacles were slightly less brain hungry. Susser’s direction and the central performances from Brad Ashby and Mia Wasikowska completely sell the story and illustrate that when it comes to world-changing events outside of our normal experience, we’ll adapt with worrying ease. But that doesn’t mean our personalities will change; a bully’s still a bully, brother and sister still fight and the kids aren’t gonna do the washing up if no one’s around to make them.

Of course, even with all that, it’s a hard sell if things just don’t look right. However, not only are the visual effects flawless—helmed by Mike Seymour of fxphd who also filled the role of Executive Producer—but I have to admit, Richard Mueck’s nerve-jangling zombi turn had me tauter than the rope holding him back as the kids taunt and mock him; this is, after all, a zombie flick and those critters have a pesky way of managing to sink their teeth into all but the overly cautious.

Much has been made of the technical achievements of ILSJ, with it hailed as “a showcase of the most modern digital production techniques” by Digital Producer Magazine. Director of photography Adam Arkapaw shot the film in Sydney, Australia on a Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream digital camera with Codex Digital recording technology enabling shots to be checked on set in full HD for focus and special effects.

ILSJ has rightly kicked up a storm of festival praise at both Sundance and the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival where it was awarded the Prix Canal.

After Ringu, which is credited with kicking things off, Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On movies are the most important and popular J-Horror works. They add hopelessness and desolation to the mix. In each of the seven films (Ju-On: The Curse 1 & 2, Ju-On: The Grudge 1, 2, & 3, and the American remakes, The Grudge 1 & 2), all directed by Shimizu, innocent, everyday people confront a curse, formed from the rage inherent in an act of extreme cruelty and betrayal, and there is nothing they can do but die. There’s no answer.

In general, I enjoy films where we follow protagonists that accomplish relevant goals, but those aren’t scary movies; the Ju-Ons are.  I screened the original The Curse films for an audience of about a hundred and fifty and spent the next day listening to how I had brought them nightmares and how they didn’t feel comfortable being alone. Now that’s horror. The latter films lost some of that edge, but that’s par for the course with any series.

Before Ju-On, there was Katasumi (In a Corner) and its sibling, 444-444-4444.  Shimizu’s career was just starting in 1998. He was signed on to create two segments for an anthology movie, Gakkô no kaidan G (School Ghost Stories G), but as the producers weren’t convinced of his skills, each had to be under five minutes.  He used this time effectively, laying the foundation for his features.  Though lacking the flair of the longer pictures, the two vignettes successful convey the same feeling of doom.

The more complex Katasumi presents two school girls, wearily completing the chore of feeding their class’s pet rabbit. When one cuts her finger, the other leaves to get a bandage. It’s never good to be left alone in a horror film, even a very short one, and that’s true here. When the absent girl returns, she finds the cages ripped open and her friend missing.  Unfortunately for her, she learns the one thing worse than being alone is abruptly discovering you’re not alone.  In 444-444-4444, a teenager finds a ringing cell phone and answers it. All he hears on the other end is the mewing of a cat. When he demands to know who is playing a trick on him, he gets his answer from an uncomfortably close source.

Katasumi and 444-444-4444 aren’t terrifying on their own, but are vital pieces in the unsolvable Ju-On puzzle.

Puppet is his finest creation. Like all his work, it is hand drawn, touches on real human feelings, is filled with suffering, and is exceptionally funny. I’ve seen it on a big screen with an audience and by the end, all you could hear was laughter.

A man happily makes a hand puppet, which of course, has its own happy face. But the puppet isn’t docile and its smile doesn’t form from kindly acts. It quickly sews a clone, and together, they control the man, taking him on a journey that can only bring him pain. The jokes remind me of the physical comedy bits in Bug Bunny shorts (and that’s the highest compliment I can pay any humorous film), though darker. This isn’t Looney Tunes, but Truly Disturbed Tunes. There’s also a good deal of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Puppet, though comparatively, Mickey’s adventures were a slightly rainy picnic.

The theme here is obsession, though multiple forms of masochism fit nicely. I wouldn’t claim Puppet is a statement against obsession since it’s unlikely Smith has any interest in being cured of his own artistic compulsions. Puppet just shows you what it feels like.