What to say about this short film? Sometimes you see something and immediately feel like you know exactly what it is, what it aspires to be, and how you'll feel about it and this was that for me. I didn't even see a trailer, I just heard of the movie in passing, looked it up and read the tag line and felt as sure I knew what I was in for as I did when I first read a description of what poutine was on a menu and decided to order it. No surprises, no regrets.
This is as low budget as low budget gets and the short runtime really helps... there's not much more investment here and so there's no need to sit through obligatory character development and story exposition when neither of those things really matter... this is high concept stuff that begins and ends with a darkly funny, entertaining premise. And then delivers exactly that, with just the right amount of campiness. There's some satisfying gore at the end and a little bit of over the top shock-horror in the way that a bit of sugar helps the medicine go down. It's grotesque and absurd, but in service of the grotesquely absurd premise itself. And so it all comes full circle in the end and the ends here definitely justify the means. My first thought upon completing my viewing of this was the people I immediately wanted to share this with, to share some dark chuckles and revel in the irreverence of it all.
Could this be an addition to my regular holiday rotation? Maybe! It's short enough that it doesn't require much justification and the payoff is just a lot of fun counter-cultural and subversive joy in seeing another perverse, but tightly conveyed, distortion of the typical holiday tropes.
