Those delightfully devious devils over at the Fear Crypt Youtube channel have sent a deadly dup of sinister short films my way, and as such yours cruelly is going to give them the ol’ revoltin review treatment!
First up we have Fused:
Sarah (Sarah McGuire) has one hell of a nasty-ass skin condition, and that shit is spreadin’ faster than the town whore. Needless to say, her doctor (Jennifer Femiano) is baffled, and her paramour Cassie (Katie Rohlfing) is none to pleased by the disappearing act our heroine has pulled since this eerie epidermal nightmare has begun.
Speaking of ol’ Cass; Sarah finally lets her in on the fact that she has been havin’ more blackouts than the town drunk (just what kind of town do I live in anyway?!!)… something she’s failed to inform her doc, and when Cassie offers to watch over her during one such unconscious episode she gets an eyeful of more than she bargained for!
Running 18 minutes, Fused is packed fat with a great sense of tension and an aesthetic that definitely brings to mind material like 1993’s King/Romero team-up The Dark Half and 1988’s Cronenberg twin-centric joltin’ jam Dead Ringers while presenting a unique take on the doppelganger sub-genre of our beloved horror biz.
How does it forge it’s own path? Well, writer/director Patrick Rea manages to keep this narrative full of surprises, even if you think you know what’s going on early in the game and that keeps the audience well and truly engaged.
Speaking of that, the performances on display in this shocking short are pretty damn incredible as well; and McGuire in particular shines as a woman completely on the edge who has been pushed there by a seemingly outré force that few could scarcely comprehend.
Bottom line; Fused is well worth a wicked watch and you can do so right here:
Next we have September:
Your friendly neighborhood serial killer-type (Jeff Payne) drags a (mostly) lifeless body from the trunk of his vehicle, and we are treated to his fetishistic post-mortem ritual… but this bit of after-murder happy place is kind of fucked six ways to Sunday as someone may be crashing our main man’s ex-Mortis ghoulish good times…
Well, this was a bit of a beastly beautiful surprise cats n’ creeps!
Writer/director Mason McDonald (along with editor Tabitha McDonald) have unleashed a truly gorgeous bit of fright film cinema with September; a piece so gloriously artistic that even the insert shots serve to fill us in on the world our resident psycho inhabits so fully that dialog isn’t even necessary to convey the monstrous meat n’ potatoes of the storyline at hand!
This is a look into the world of a human spider feeding among equally-human flies, and while there are some familiar beats (Hitchcock’s Psycho is referenced heavily at one point), September manages to convey it’s own bit of world building that makes this one to truly savor, especially if you dig on such fare as John McNaughton’s 1986 slice-of-anti-life Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer!
As with Fused, you can check out September for your own damn selves right here:
