If you’re a looking for an evening of charming, light-hearted shorts, you’ve come to the wrong f*#@ing place. The Milwaukee Film Festival has assembled nine demented and shocking short films from around the world to create “The Best Damn F*#@ing Midnight Program Ever. Shit”. Serving as one of eight presentations in the Milwaukee Film Festival’s Shorter is Better series, this black sheep of the bunch has no patience for subtlety or light-stomachs. This program is meant to entertain mature audiences only. There is a challenge when dealing with subject matter such as the Wild West, April Fool’s Day or extraterrestrial vaginas infesting the walls of a horny teenager’s bedroom. Some ideas can build audience interest while others may fall flat with an uneven tone. The impact of a midnight movie, or any movie for that matter, relies on an assured direction fully aware of the potential overuse of gimmicks. Unfortunately, the nine filmmakers behind “The Best Damn F*#@ing Midnight Program Ever. Shit”, often depend too heavily on shock value to give their entry a memorable flavor. The results are mixed, at best.
The opening film, “Kekashi” presents a distraught chemist attempting to revive his departed wife by extracting bodily fluids from her corpse. Not including the dying cackle of the chemist’s wife and a haunting rendition of “What a Wonderful World”, “Kekashi” is void of any dialogue, narration, or any aid in understanding the story. We are trapped in a room with this sleep-deprived man for the entire film with no context to the film’s time frame or the events that preceded. A series of striking kaleidoscope-like imagery lead us to a nightmareish ending as the man and his wife are reincarnated as a half-man, half-bird monstrosity and a flower. It’s an unsettling mood piece that was met with scattered, somewhat hesitant applause.
Among the more challenging and perhaps experimental films were: “The Obvious Child,” a crudely animated short about a rabbit’s sexual and emotion attraction to a child and her disemboweled parents and the “Invasion,” another animated short this time presenting a zombie outbreak through the eyes of a teenage beach party. Although the synopsis of these shorts may provoke exciting thought, their translation to screen is distracted by the overbearing use of violent imagery that serves little purpose to the films’ narrative. Instead of igniting interest to the reasoning behind this gimmick, we are left lost in the middle of a story with no purpose.
On the craftier side of the program lies Erik Kissack’s “The Gunfighter,” a western/comedy narrated by the booming, all testosterone voice of Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation). In this short, an outlaw struts into a bar to find a room of whores and bounty hunters. Every character can hear the all-knowing narrator and attempt to defy his prophecies. The narrator hilariously reveals secret after secret to the bar, leading to an over-the-top Mexican standoff between every patron. Here we have a high-concept film executed to perfection. An engaging screenplay performed with spot-on comedic timing make the gory finale all the more shocking and successful. The equally enchanting Irish thriller, “Box Room” also straddles the line between multiple genres, sci-fi horror and family drama. An anti-social teenager discovers a wall in his bedroom is host to the reproductive system of an extraterrestrial being. After a nail-biting test run with a pencil, the boy goes on to insert his genitalia and discovers the following morning that he’s impregnated the creature. The Alien-esque tone is executed so well that the unresolved ending feels something like a lazy betrayal to an otherwise completely realized film. Regardless, these are both worth a streaming, and are far more accessible than the previous films.
The program’s finale, “Fool’s Day” was the evening’s most well-crafted and genuinely entertaining film. A fourth-grade class prepares a prank on their teacher by adding art room tools and condiments to her pot of coffee. The prank becomes all too real when the woman’s head explodes from the chemical cocktail sending the kids into a frenzy. The class of eight-year-olds decides to hide her body to avoid the consequences. It then takes the viewer through a series of hilarious trails including trash cans, sandboxes and a suspicious D.A.R.E officer played by the the hilarious Mitchell Jarvis.
An alternative direction for Fool’s Day could have thrown the story off course and into the pile of underdeveloped shorts. While still mildly entertaining and not without its gems, this year’s Best Damn F*#@ing Midnight Program Ever. Shit. would preferably be accompanied by a few strong drinks from the theatre’s bar.