“Eli Roth was my camp counselor.”

Back at Sundance – Day #4

This was the day I was looking forward to since I opened up the Sundance film guide and started mapping out what I was going to see.

Today was Scary Sundance Day!

First up was a short film titled, RITE. Alice Conway gives us a disconcerting front row seat for a little girl’s preparation for a very important ceremony. The beginning is very similar to a great film we had at AFI FEST a couple years back, Nicole Barnette’s FOURTEEN. In that film, the little girl was being prepped for a marriage to a creepy old Mormon guy. This one goes another direction. Effectively. I won’t give it away, but it takes the notion of the rites of adulthood to a proper or improper (depending on how you look at it) extreme.

Then it was time for GRACE. Directed by Paul Solet and starring Jordan Ladd, it’s your basic story where a pregnant woman’s baby dies prior to birth, beset by grief she carries the dead infant to term and then wills it to life after it’s born. And then there are uhm…complications… One of the things we learned during the Q&A after the film was that when he was a kid, Paul’s camp counselor was Eli (HOSTEL) Roth. It explains a lot.

Anyway, here’s some things you learn: You can put up all the fly paper and protective netting in the world, but you’re never going to convince flies they should stay away from your kinda dead baby. To ensure that things can get as worse as they possibly can, it helps if mom steadily becomes more and more psychotically focused on keeping said baby alive. Finally, lesbians carrying an unrequited torch can’t be trusted to make the right decisions to keep the horror from happening. I loved this film. Loved it. It takes you down a very, very dark path – methodically and thoroughly, rich with theme and detail. I will finish with this thought: If a rotting but living baby has a bloodlust, is it really necessary to define it as “vampire” or “zombie”? I mean, why must we always get hung up on labels? I think I can state what’s important with this quote from the film: “She’s special, she needs special food.”

Next on the scary hit parade was Jason Eisner’s short film, TREEVENGE. Well, fun scary, I guess. Let me set the scene for you: A pristine field of evergreen trees faces an onslaught of men wielding axes and chain saws. It’s a horrible scene of torture and slaughter and the trees don’t understand. (We know this, because their horrified peeps and squeaks are translated via subtitles.) Then, they’re taken to Christmas tree lots and separated from their friends and family and then put in houses and forced to have decorations put on their branches by more horrible people. Eventually, of course, they exact their,…wait for it…TREEVENGE. In every violent and gory way imaginable. It’s great.

And the evening’s closer was Tommy Wirkola’s DEAD SNOW. Let me say this first off: No matter what country you’re in and regardless of what language the people speak, there will always be young people willing to go to some reasonably isolated place ignoring any logical reason they should do otherwise, for the express purpose of being killing fodder. Second, those young people – even in Norway, in this case – will get a visit by a scary old guy kindly informing them that they’re all gonna die. It’s a grand tradition held since that old coot on the bicycle in the original FRIDAY THE 13TH. And it continues here. And then, it’s time for the zombie Nazis to join the party. I don’t think it’s necessary to spell out what exactly happens, but here are two more truths to leave you with: First, the only thing that pisses a zombie Nazi off more than young people stealing their treasure is young people having sex after stealing their treasure. Second, inevitably while in a killing frenzy against whatever mob of bad things that are threatening you it’s important to also kill your friend or girlfriend because they picked the wrong moment to arrive on the scene just out of your peripheral vision.

I mean, let’s face it – that’s really their bad. Right?