Cooking with Bill

Bill and Karen present a series of infomercials on the newest cooking appliances which do it all for you – although usually at a high cost.

These short films are a stark contrast with the other material currently released from Neill Blomkamp's Oat Studios. The main two shorts are over 20 minutes long, and feature incredibly high production values; Cooking with Bill is a 1980's infomercial on VHS tape. The 'joke' is the same in each episode – which is to say that the cooking demonstration goes horribly wrong. Often I would phrase that "hilariously wrong" but these films are better for not playing it as a joke, but instead letting it be dark and disturbing. The presence of hair, organs, and other tragic outcomes all are strikingly lacking in laughs, and there is a real sense of horror and repulsion in the two presenters – even though they know they have to do their jobs and sell this stuff.

As simple moments of horror, the shorts work on this basis, however I do wish that there was more obviously to it than that. The harm done by technology, but yet the push of companies to sell what they know are imperfect or incomplete products – there are elements of these in there, but the moments of horror dominate and if there is a subtext, it is very 'sub'. This leaves the shorts as curios to add to the mystery around Oat Studios – but there is a reason that these films have a fraction of the viewers of films like Rakka, Firebase, and Zygote.

Skip this. Not even sure why it's in appocalyptic series.

It will only make you vomit. Stupid and pointless. Avoid completely. Bizzare, boring and pointless.

Lack of sense of humour. This was the most disgusting thing i have seen lately. Just like a teen-job!!!

On the other hand, the idea was okey and the acting was pretty good. I don't know how did they produce such a waste!!!

Where they are flipping through channels and some of the most bizarre things came on the TV?

This episode can perfectly fit in one of those. If you squint your eyes and try hard enough you nay find some comedy but lets say "horror gross" is a better genre for it

Was this rock bottom for oatsstudio?

Cooking with Bill is a series of shorts about the titular fictional 80s cooking show. The "joke" of every episode is that Bill uses some kind of cooking device which ends up producing a gross and gory mess. That's pretty much all there is to these shorts.

Personally I did not find this series of shorts funny or even entertaining at all, in fact watching them made me feel very uncomfortable and perhaps not in the way that was intended. The shock at the end of each episode is completely predictable and there's no continuity between the episodes at all. When I first started watching them I assumed they were going to progressively get worse as they went on but instead they just reset at the start of each new episode, Bill cuts his hand open in the first one and then he's completely fine in the next.

Even the worst of Blomkamp's work is usually passable at best but this was just terrible, I'm not sure what he was thinking with this and with his name behind it I expected more.