Hungry

Being a huge Gilligan's Island fan, Hungry filled my appetite. The concept of four guys trapped inside a "German tomb"(VW Van) makes me laugh already. I saw this short film at a film festival in New York. It's one of those short films that you wish were a feature-length film. You just want to know more and see more of these four, misfit filmmakers. Normally, scenes inside of vehicles make me crazy. Hungry is definitely the exception. After a minute or two, I felt like I was in the van with them-and liked it! Though some of the dialogue seemed ridiculous and over the top, the actors were so serious and real with their delivery. That made the dialogue even funnier. One of my favorite lines was spoken by this Charles Manson looking guy-named Charlie. When the guys discovered they couldn't get out of the van, he looked around and said something like, "We could be down here without food for days, let's get down to business...who's for dinner." They then proceed to come up with a plan to decide who will be killed and eaten. In a Q&A after the movie, the director said that if he did make a feature length, he might add the "living dead" trying to enter the van during the four guy's dialogue.

When I saw this movie screened up at Sundance a few years ago, I was in a room with about 250 people, and the problem was that most of them were laughing so much during so many parts of the film, that it was difficult to hear all the lines sometime. The script was incredibly funny and really clever, and all four of the main characters were terrific. The concept of having four friends literally trapped inside their VW van after it ran off the road and crashed into a snowy, mountainous ravine in rural Utah with nothing to eat but themselves sounds morbid, but it was very entertaining. When the director did the q&a afterwards, he was so esoteric!