Ben is an aspiring movie writer who is buying a book online to help with his craft. He sees others have bought a book called Plot Devices and he decides to pick that up at the same time. When it arrives though, Ben finds that it is not a book but some sort of box with a button on top. Hitting the button sees his front yard suddenly have a soft sepia touch to how it looks and a woman that has loved him all her life but perhaps not known it to this moment is running towards him in her wedding dress to profess this love and thus live happily ever after. Not knowing what else to do, Ben hits the button again and finds him and his black partner pinned down in a gun battle with villains – there is a bomb to defuse and his partner only has a few days to go before retirement.
This short film takes a good idea and mostly delivers it in a satisfying and clever manner. The plot device button is shorthand for lazy writing and genre tropes and as a result Ben finds himself thrown from one genre to another, all the time with all the clichés and such of the genre being laid out. So, not only does the scenario happen, but the whole thing has the look and feel of a different film even though all the action is happening on the same front lawn. This is achieved several ways but primarily it is the look of the film – so very soft focus in some, a bit twee and drab for the naval-gazing indie movie, very grainy and 1970's for the zombie movie and so on. It is clever because it instantly puts the viewer in the genre, which is not easy to do since we can often recognize it when we see it but it isn't always easy to recreate what makes it this way.
Within each of the genres the clichés are played for comedy; the laughs could be sharper perhaps, because it was not always as clever with the genres as I would have liked, but it is entertaining thanks to its fast pace and quick changes. Some of the acting is a bit "functional" but given they are playing to genre clichés, it really doesn't matter too much, although Worley is not as strong in the lead as I would have liked. After watching this short I read the blurb and found that the genre effects were all generated in computer by using a piece of software (the one mentioned in the closing credits). Essentially this makes the film a technical demonstration and, with this in mind, I was grateful that it was an entertaining one.
