Chattanooga Film Festival Reviews - Part 1
For my first report from the 2023 Chattanooga Film Festival, here’s a look at two feature-length films and three short films:
The Weird Kidz - Writer/director Zach Passero uses lo-fi animation to tell the story of 6th grader Dug (Tess Passero), who goes on a camping trip with older brother Wyatt (Ellar Coltrane). Wyatt’s girlfriend and Dug’s two buddies come along. Soon after arriving, they encounter a giant ant-like creature that attacks them. For help, the crew turns to the local sheriff (Sean Bridgers) and a convenience store manager (Angela Bettis) who previously warned them about the creature. Things are not entirely what they seem, however, and help is not necessarily imminent. The Weird Kidz is jam-packed with animated gore, genitalia jokes, and monster mayhem. Perhaps obviously, this won’t be a movie for every taste, but it does have a few undeniable laughs. Fans of adult animation will want to take note.
We Might Hurt Each Other - In this Lithuanian slasher flick, a group of classmates head out to a rundown cottage in the middle of nowhere for a graduation party. They stumble upon a bunch of life-sized wooden figures in the middle of a field. Common sense would tell them not to mess with those figures, but of course they do. A killer in a mask made of wood abruptly shows up to start killing them, one by one. We Might Hurt Each Other takes an awfully long time to get going. Once it does, though, you get some primo gore effects. A shot of the killer pushing a woman’s face into a pane of broken glass is more realistic than I’ve ever seen that effect accomplished before. The story’s ending also opens up intriguing possibilities for what happens next.
No Overnight Parking - Alyssa Milano plays a woman who’s just had a major fight with her husband (French Stewart). She leaves, only to find herself stuck in a parking garage with a masked psycho. That set-up sounds like a million slasher movies, but writer/director Meg Swertlow puts a nifty feminist twist on it. A dark sense of humor further enlivens this ingenious, atmospherically photographed short.
Stop Dead - Two cops find a young woman shuffling down a country road late at night. They attempt to question her, only to learn the hard way that she’s being followed by an entity that can’t kill as long as its prey keeps moving. That’s a cool concept, one that could be fleshed out to feature length. The entity is eerily visualized, and there is a really good jump scare in this 7-minute short. I hope writer David Scullion and director Emily Greenwood will expand upon Stop Dead at some point. It’s a winner.
We Forgot About the Zombies - It’s amazing how many laughs writer/director Chris McInroy packs into a 4-minute running time. Two guys, one of whom has been bitten by a zombie, force their way into a makeshift laboratory. A bunch of syringes are on a table. They believe a cure for the zombie infection is in those syringes. Each time the infected guy gets jabbed with one, a different hilarious side effect occurs. The short has excellent effects, along with terrific deadpan performances from Carlos LaRotta and Kyle Irion.
