Two more films last night, in the only night in the Victoria for Holehead this year. Today (Friday) we move to our traditional home of the Roxie for a week before having the final weekend in the intimate confines of the Vortex Room (fair warning, if you want to see anything at the Vortex room, it's an awesome space but there's only room for about 50 people, and the passholders will take up about a third of that. So get tickets early because it's likely to fill up.)
Anyway, the first show was supposed to start with a short called SACKED. But...something to do with the DVD not arriving or not working and no backup...anyway, it was cancelled. Sucks, but I've come to expect at least one technical screwup like that in every Holehead. Doesn't mean it doesn't suck, though.
Anyway, the first feature was A LITTLE BIT ZOMBIE, and I have to give them credit for attacking the zombie genre with a ton of slapstick glee. There's a zombie hunting duo of a psychotic, heavily armed old man (with a fondness for tactical bacon) and a young female researcher who wrote the book on zombies and carries an unexplained mystical orb that glows and points the way to zombies. Then there's the vacationing couples. The engaged couple--the nice corporate conflict resolution specialist and his domineering bitch of a fiance. And the other couple is his sister and her husband/his best friend. Well, long story short he gets bit by a mosquito full of zombie blood and starts turning. But he also resists the infection pretty well, I assume because of his awesome conflict resolution skills. And that's the source of most of the slapstick. He finds that he's impervious to pain and eating anything other than brains makes him throw up (it's just a dietary restriction!) Like most slapstick, some gags work and some fall flat. I wasn't really getting into the movie until the big projectile vomit scene. Ultimately, it was pretty fun, although [SPOILER ALERT!!!] I really wanted that bitch of a fiance to die in the end. Oh yeah, and it had a cute little bunny in it!
Next up was FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS a movie about meta-movies that's so meta it crawls up its own ass, out its mouth, and back up its ass again (maybe 5 more times. It's like the INCEPTION of head-up-your-ass movies.) People Persons has gone off to Hollywood to become a star. But celebrity has changed him, so he goes back to San Francisco to reconnect with his roots and mend fences with his former friends, chiefly Sherman Firecracker, the struggling auteur behind such ideas as THE KILLING FIELDS...on ice! When they get together they decide ultimately to make a movie called...FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS about People Persons (playing himself) returning to San Francisco and reconnecting with his friends to make a low budget...monster movie. But the lines between the movie and reality get so blurred that he doesn't know if he's fake killing his friends in a movie or really killing them in real life. And that's just the first half, before it contorts itself into yet more layers of reality/artifice (and, of course, the whole thing is just a movie anyway.) I think it started as a clever idea, maybe good for a 20-30 minute short, tops. But stretching it out to 87 minutes it just ended up dragging on, and on, and on. When someone yelling, "cut" and revealing one more layer of movie-making isn't surprising but annoying, you should stop.
Total Running Time: 174 minutes
My Total Minutes: 305,139
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