Shorts for Sickos! - Volume 1

Today, on To Obscurity and Beyond, I'm going to be trying something different. As many of my readers know, the vast majority of what I review are short films. As much as I love films of all lengths, I find that short films are usually the most fun to review. However, a lot of the shorts I want to talk about are usually too short for me to review on their own. Granted, I have individually covered films in the past that are under 10-20 minutes, but these usually don't make for great reviews because often times, there is simply not enough content to digest. To compensate, and for the sake of variety, dear reader, I introduce you to.. Shorts for Sickos! The concept of Shorts for Sickos is extremely simple. In each volume, I will review four different short films, usually of the extreme or weird variety, that are under 10-20 minutes and thus wouldn't make for the best stand-alone reviews. So buckle up and prepare yourself, as volume one is going to be a very, very gory one.

Das Blutville Massaker (2021) - Canada / directed by Ben Gaudet

On the box, Das Blutville Massaker is touted as a lost German splatter film made in 2001 by an unknown filmmaker named Markus Heidman. What is held within, however, is a short and sweet tribute to underground German ultra-gore by teenage Canadian filmmaker Ben Gaudet. The "plot," if you can call it that, takes place in the German town of Blutville, as a psychotic killer goes on a rampage after he watches one too many splatter movies. What ensues is an unapologetic, uncontrolled gorefest of epic proportions.

What Blutville lacks in plot it more than makes up for in its explosive, insanely over-the-top gore effects. There are only a couple of kills, but the ones we get are blood-soaked and are beautifully shot. If I had never heard of or seen Ben's other work before, I would have been fooled. The short is intentionally shot to be as amateurish as possible, and thus nails the amateur-film vibe perfectly. Shot on 8mm video and then purposely copied from tape to tape to degrade the video quality, Das Blutville Massaker also perfectly nails the atmosphere of a lost gore movie. The short is also very well-edited, and the director's influence is made even more obvious as the soundtrack is recycled from the original Violent Shit. While the short is nothing too special when compared to Ben's other work, the gore effects and editing alone are nothing short of impressive, and they truly show the young director's potential to branch out and become even better.

Backyard Mutilations (2020) - United States / directed by Gage Black

Similar to the last film, Backyard Mutilations is another short about a deranged lunatic who goes on a murder spree, inspired by his love of violent cinema. Except this time, the killer brutally maims, stabs, decapitates, mutilates and tears apart his victims in his backyard and in his house. Not only is Backyard Mutilations a literal backyard production, but it's also made by an uprising teenage filmmaker!

Fellow Texan Gage Black began making short films around 2019, with shot-on-video inspired gore shorts such as Violent Murder and Feeders Revenge, both of which remain unreleased to this day. As he kept making films, in association with Ben Gaudet, he began working harder to improve his special effects and his filmmaking skills with projects such as Vibro, Verrückt and Fahrenheit. The results are often very rough yet thoroughly entertaining splatterfests, with great variety in kills and ambitious special effects. Backyard Mutilations may not have much of a plot and is hardly different from something like Verrückt, but it stands as a fun showcase of Gage's experiments with gore effects. Some of the effects are pretty rough as you can tell the props are made of styrofoam and plastic, but there are some well done kills such as the screwdriver and the shovel ones. Even in the short films made since this one, Gage has been steadily improving his skills overall, using better cameras and more elaborate effects and editing. Similar to Ben, I respect Gage's efforts and am curious to see how he will develop his works in the near future.

The Long Island Goregrind Massacre (2021) - United States / directed by Gore Filth

Gore Filth is back with yet another horrific shot-on-video short! This time we venture to Long Island, New York, to a venue where multiple goregrind bands put on a fun show for the crowd. But, after each show, one member of each band gets picked off by an unseen killer with a variety of different weapons.

The best part of this 18-minute short is seeing the bands play. We get live performances of at least one song each from Hit Run Drivers, Charcuterie, Bowel Erosion, Whore Abortion and Splattered Entrails. Each show is energetic and manic, and its fun seeing the banter between the bands and the crowd. That's all well and good, but now for the worst part: the gore effects! I understand the point of the short is to be z-grade schlock, but the effects are just laughably bad. They're undoubtedly some of the worst gore effects I've seen in a long time. Every gore scene is shot in Gore Filth's backyard, with the build-up to each murder being shot at the actual venue, and the scenery change is painfully obvious as the backgrounds never match. But by far, the funniest kill is where the killer randomly gets hit by a car. They roll over the hood of the car and then we see a single piece of intestine hit the fence. This short is bad, it's really bad, but that's the point, and it did get a really good laugh out of me. However, I can't recommend this unless you like goregrind and the cheapest of effects.

Forest of Death (2021) - United States / directed by Damian Bishop

For our final short we'll take a look at Forest of Death, one of the latest offerings from Dungeon Entertainment. Dungeon is a film team, led by Damian Bishop, that mostly makes lo-fi shot-on-video horror-comedy shorts. I have seen a couple of their works in the past such as Valley of Carnage and Date Nite, both of which which I greatly enjoyed and highly recommend. They are very funny and entertaining shorts that are well-made in the spirit of campy shot-on-video cinema. On the other hand, Forest of Death is one of the more serious, more straightforward horror offerings from Dungeon. Being entirely shot, edited and produced by Damian himself, Forest follows a man in a yellow Hazmat suit and gas mask who wades through a sinister forest. The deeper he goes, the worse things get as he finds mutilated body parts and bloodied human bones. To his horror, it's not long until he finds himself being stalked and chased by green mutants in Hazmat suits, and he must fight for his life.

For a short made entirely by one guy, it's very well done and very effectively made. The special effects are the obvious standout, with some really good gore and some creepy masks and mutant makeup. But the short also knows how to build a hell of an atmosphere. The low and droning ambient music and the terrible video quality make the short very creepy and grimy, and the editing and pacing is perfect. It's definitely one of the best-made shorts I've covered in this review.

CONCLUSION:

While there may not have been much in today's reviews in terms of variety, I can not deny that these shorts, despite being rough around the edges overall, clearly had a lot of heart and passion put behind them. And yes, that goes for Long Island Goregrind Massacre as well. Just because these shorts may have rough effects or dodgy technical aspects, it doesn't mean that there wasn't any care or effort put into them. It's great to see how these filmmakers continue to branch out with each work and keep working to build their audience and to improve their craft.

I'm hoping the readers will enjoy this new format of reviewing short films. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them below or to email me! In the meantime, for the next volume of Shorts for Sickos, we will be traveling over to Europe and taking a look at four shorts from four different countries. Trust me, it only gets weirder and more fucked up from here...

RELEASES:
-Das Blutville Massaker has yet to be released in any form. I was given access to the film thanks to Ben Gaudet himself (thanks dude!).

-Backyard Mutilations was included on an anthology called I Was a Teenage Gorehound, released on DVD by SOV Horror. This anthology also features Gore Collector by Ben Gaudet, The Cross by Stephen Bloodworth, and my own shot-on-video short The Tape of Karma, plus a ton of fun extras. If interested, you can order your copy here.

-The Long Island Goregrind Massacre was released on a very limited edition DVD by SOV Horror, and is currently out of print. However, it is possible that more copies will be reprinted soon.

-As far as I'm aware, Forest of Death has yet to be released on physical media, but it can be watched on the Dungeon Entertainment YouTube channel, along with their many other works. You can watch the short here.

Maggot Farmers (2021)

Maggot Farmers (2021) - Belgium
Directed by: Wesley Remory

ABOUT THE FILM:
Midsplatternight Pictures began back in 2003 as a local horror film festival in Belgium, and was the brainchild of one Wesley Remory. Wesley and others initially aimed to promote independent filmmakers and their work within Belgium, but many years later, Wesley and crew decided to try their hand at making a horror film of their own. But Wesley didn't want to make just any by-the-numbers horror film. In fact, he turned hellbent on making a love-letter to the weird and gory shot-on-video movies of the 80's, as well as paying tribute to the late, great Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci. And ultimately, Wesley decided to do so with a project called Maggot Farmers. The story of Maggot Farmers is very simple, but is also very effectively told across its runtime. There is an old woman in a cloak performing a sinister ritual as she casts spells and then buries five voodoo dolls into a pot of soil and then cuts her hand, spilling her blood into the soil. Meanwhile, a group of men are kidnapping and butchering women for their meals, and using their organs to feed the maggots. But little do they know that the dead are being resurrected and that the men are merely fodder for these undead beasts...

The original Maggot Farmers poster.

THE HISTORY OF MAGGOT FARMERS:

The original version of Maggot Farmers was written and began to materialize as early as 2009, with Wesley writing the script and setting up effects, but as it turns out, the production and culmination of Maggot Farmers as a whole was cursed from the very beginning. With the cast and crew's availability constantly changing, on top of bad weather, very little filmmaking experience and very little footage, the production of the original Maggot Farmers was cancelled in 2011. But Midsplatternight's foray into film didn't end there. Over the next decade, they stirred up a considerable buzz in the underground horror scene with atmospheric short works such as Prognosticum, Verbintenis, and their second most-recent work, the infamous Walging. Despite the success that the shorts of Midsplatternight Pictures saw, Wesley could not forget about Maggot Farmers. It just kept haunting him; he had to tell this story, he had to realize his true visions.

In 2019, Maggot Farmers was re-written, and with more experience under their belt, the Midsplatternight crew went back into production on the film. But just like its original incarnation, this production was plagued from the very beginning. Aside from audio recordings being lost or ruined, issues with crew vehicles, shooting delays and special effects malfunctioning, the biggest curse of the production was the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Because of the scare, once more, the production of Maggot Farmers was delayed indefinitely. But, through patience, stubbornness and perseverance, Wesley and crew pulled through and finished Maggot Farmers in late 2021, and now this twisted vision of ritualistic, undead mayhem can be unleashed onto the populace. But can they swallow it?

REVIEW:

Maggot Farmers wears its influence on its sleeve but it also stands head and shoulders above other homages to old-school horror. Whereas many different homages and tributes to 80's horror often fail to recapture what made old horror so special by overusing genre tropes, Maggot Farmers is much more reserved and well-structured. The story, while simple and very short, is told well and with very little dialogue. There's maybe two scenes in the entire short that have any dialogue, and it boils down to simple exchanges. But Maggot Farmers doesn't need much dialogue to tell its story, and the filmmakers prove this by working wonders with visual storytelling. The camera work and the lighting both play a huge role in setting the tone for the film. The entire time, the camera work is extremely smooth and fluid, and is only ever jerky to accentuate shifts in tone. For example, when a character is being approached by a zombie, we suddenly switch to a shaky POV to demonstrate a shift in tone. The lighting isn't overly dull or overly colorful. There's heavy use of soft yellow and orange tints, and when the zombies are onscreen, they are aided by soft blue glows that effectively build an uneasy atmosphere. The ambient droning music only further lulls in the viewer, as well as a few 80's horror-inspired synth tunes that are well composed. Additionally, the film is aided with sound design that will both chill the viewer, and disgust the viewer during the grisly scenes of cannibalism and dismemberment.

The actors do a pretty good job, considering the rather simple characters they have to work with. There's an especially impressive effects sequence where a character is lit on fire and writhes around in agony, à la Olaf Ittenbach's The Burning Moon. My hat goes off to the person brave enough to actually let themselves be set ablaze, especially on a production with such a low budget. But despite the low budget, the film is well made overall, including its special effects. While not a total gorefest, Maggot Farmers has some especially impressive gore and zombie makeup. The zombies look creepy as hell and are truly reminiscent of Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2. All things considered, the only complaints I have are minor sound mix issues that are only noticeable if the viewer is wearing headphones. But those are so trivial they may as well not be mentioned at all. Overall, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect going into Maggot Farmers, considering I've never seen anything from Midsplatternight Pictures before. I do, however, remember when Walging was first released and it was receiving a lot of praise from indie horror fans. I was intrigued, but at the time I was a broke 17 year-old kid with no money, and alas, I never had a chance to see anything from this studio. But now that I've seen Maggot Farmers, I'm curious to see what else they have, because this was a very well done short! At the time of writing this review, Maggot Farmers has not been released physically or digitally, but I suggest jumping at it once it's released. This is an 80's horror throwback worth watching and revisiting.

On a side note, one thing I love is that during the end credits, we also get to see what survives of the original 2011 Maggot Farmers, along with its respective credits. It's interesting to see how the film has evolved over the decade it took to complete, and it's even better to see that despite all of the hardships, Wesley Remory never gave up on his vision. Why should anyone else give up on theirs?

RELEASES:
-Maggot Farmers will be seeing a DVD release in the near future, either at the end of 2021 or in early 2022, and is purported to have all of Midsplatternight Pictures' previous short films as bonus features. To keep updated, I'd recommend checking out their Facebook page here.