Girl with guitar

Delphine comes into a guitar store every day and amateurishly plucks at a priceless Les Paul. But she’s hiding a secret…
This great short is actually one of only two directing credits of the Irish singer-songwriter Nick Kelly. More on Delphine:
Nick wrote and directed his own first short film, “Delphine” in the summer of 2003 [...]

A masterful frame-up

Oh My God will split people into two camps: 1. Those who are squeamish, and won’t find it funny at all. 2. Those who aren’t squeamish, and have a socially unacceptable sense of humor, who will think it’s flipping hilarious. Definitely for fans of the accidental gunshot wound to the head scene in Pulp Fiction.
The [...]

don’t go in there!!!

It’s part of a night watchman’s job description to investigate suspicious things, and yes, a dead body is suspicious, but still… you just wish this guy would say ’screw this job’ and make a cowardly exit. Of course, he doesn’t, and the result is Night Watch, a gripping and superbly-made extended stalker sequence. It’s from [...]

Murderous robots from outer space

Attackazoids! is the story of one woman’s struggle against some giant robots, which are presumably called Attackazoids, that kill the snot out of people with their green lasers. It’s a great example of sci-fi/horror done creatively and on a low budget. In other words, it’s everything AI was not.

On director Brian Lonano, from Undergroundfilm:
Brian Lonano [...]

Thrill of the chase

Out of Print is a warm eulogy for the age of pursuing media: when you had to physically find the things you wanted to read, see, and listen to, rather than click twice on Rapidshare or Pirate Bay.
Out of Print is from Danny Plotnick (from his website):
For the past fourteen years Plotnick has been [...]

Bound to offend

In the cultural climate that produced To Catch a Predator, it’s a risky enterprise to sympathetically examine the lives of sex offenders. Other than the brave subplot of Tom Perrotta’s Little Children (and the movie it became), examples hardly spring to mind. Nicholas Humphries’ Larson attempts just this: to portray a sex offender as a [...]

Porn cinema verite

Porn Queens of the 70s is a mockumentary, by turns hilarious and depressing, about washed-up porn stars. The 20-minute short, filmed in 1994, is now available in its entirety on Undergroundfilm.com. Director Danielle Stallings won recognition from the Director’s Guild of America for Porn Queens; read more about Stallings on the website of her most [...]

A parent-assissted ‘F’

We all know kids whose parents helped them a little bit too much with school projects – the paper-mache castle had a drawbridge, or the nature diorama powered a lightbulb – but this help usually made the project better. Not since Homer Simpson made Lisa an abysmal Florida costume for her school show has help [...]

It absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!

There are those who hope for a cyberpunk future where computers can love and nothing is what it seems, and those who don’t. For the former, Adam Wolf has made Cubie, a film that, taking a cue from James Cameron’s Terminator series, gives us the (literal) perspective of a thinking robot. It’s a brilliant touch [...]

Fear and learning

For a documentary reflection on the difficult themes (the fear and desire for revenge caused by sudden violence) touched on by The Fighter, Andy Blubaugh’s courageous and riveting short doc Scaredycat is essential viewing. Blubaugh, who was randomly and brutally assaulted and robbed in Portland, makes his own fear – irrational and un-PC – the [...]