The animated shorts from Fantastic Fest that I got to see are here.

Drone (2022): In this film by Sean Buckelew, a malfunction at a CIA press event pushes a drone installed with an ethical AI personality to go off its mission as it attempts to understand its purpose. The animation in this short is astounding, rooted in reality yet having a cartoon look that’s really appealing. I loved how we saw not only the actions of the drone, but also the way it impacts the lives of the many people who were part of it. The world starts to follow the drone on its mission, but the government learns nothing, putting a smiley face on weapons of death even after the only machine — or soldier — with a heart is long gone. A sobering, realistic ending for a movie filled with sheer fantasy.

Goodbye Jerome! (2022): Directed and written by Chloé Farr, Gabrielle Selnet and Adam Sillard, Goodbye Jerome!, the protagonist tries to find his wife Maryline. In the course of his search, he gets lost within a surreal and colorful world in which no one seems to be able to help him.

With the voices of William Lebghil and Alma Jodorowsky, as well as a gorgeous art style that just guides you into a simple yet complicated and rewarding otherworld, this is a film that will stay in my brain for some time.

This film looked like the posters in Spencer’s in the 70s when I was too young to smoke marijuana. Ah, a wistful simpler time and man, I wish we still had Wicks ‘n Sticks.

The Grannies (2022): Director Marie Foulston relies on the imagery of the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 and the voices and experiences of players Marigold Bartlett, Andrew Brophy, Ian MacLarty and Kalonica Quigley as they explain what happened when they decided to go beyond the borders of the online version of the game and found places where reality broke, where they dropped for hours in endless chasms and were able to create shared moments despite not being actually together.

I also enjoyed that this group played as old women, as whenever they encountered other players, they found that others reacted strongly to how odd it was to have four old women attack them.

A Guitar in the Bucket (2021): Created by Boyoung Kim, this feels like the big problems with our world and the world that is to come, a place where push buttons and machines decide what we want and what’s good for us. Machines have everything that anyone could want, but when a young girl wants to be a guitar player — something that no one else wants but her — the world keeps that from happening. It reminds me of the fact that we can get any movie we want at any time and people choose to not challenge themselves with cinema but instead keep watching the same movies or worse, refuse to explore the films of other countries.

Happy New Year, Jim (2022): Morten Hakke and Jim Muzungu are playing video games all day just like every single day but today is New Year’s Eve and things feel different in this animated film by Andrea Gatopoulos. I feel this, as I sit here all night and try and fill my site with content that maybe nine people will read. Then again, if you can reach nine people, that’s more than you just experiencing things for yourself. So even if all you have is one friend playing video games with you, that’s something. I have to confess, I have spent hours in video games earning achievements and getting new clothes for a character that in days I won’t need or think of, but at the time, it feels like it means so much more than it eventually does. Also: are we all just in a video game instead of life?

Krasue (2022): The krasue may be best known to film fans from Mystics In Bali and Demonic Beauty.  This animated film by Ryo Hirano has a Yakuza encounter one of the creatures, which looks like a woman’s head with all of her organs hanging out as she flies around.

Everything in this movie is absolutely stunning, a neon-colored and blood-strewn romance that also looks like River City Ransom and I’m here for all of that. This whole thing would be pretty frightening if it were live action but seeing as how it’s animated, it’s really pretty whimsical.

More movies should have flying heads with guts hanging out floating all over the place.

Magnified City (2022): This movie makes me consider the fact that my love for cinema is often trapped in the past sometime around 1981. Those are the kind of thoughts that come into your head when you think over a movie about a human magnifying glass being kidnapped by a secret society of projector humans who want to use his lens to recapture the city’s greatness. Do I find too much joy in nostalgia? Am I doing enough to expand my influences?

Perfect City: The Mother (2022): A stop-motion story all about a wood monster giving birth to a child covered in ugly roots. A liquid with the brand name of Perfect is able to sculpt the wooden baby into a perfect human child, but should it? How wonderful that the child is CGI and it’s up against the real tactile traditional animation. This looks absolutely fantastic, a movie that blew my mind and that would make a great zone out movie if it wasn’t so sinister in parts, because I could see this taking me into some strange trips. It also makes me worried about having children any time soon. You can see more of this at official site of Shengwei Zhou, its creator.

Trichotillomania (2021): Trichotillomania is a disorder that is known to cause irresistible urges to pull out hair from the scalp, eyebrows or other areas of the body. Kate is someone suffering from it and she isn’t finding any of the answers as to why on the Internet. Man, I used to get so mad at myself in my thirties that I would just grab fistfuls of hair and yank them out. Just like cutting, the feeling of adrenaline would make me forget the mental pain that I was in, but then it gets really obvious when you have large chunks of hair missing. This short, directed and written by Anotai Pichayapatarakul, explores how this impacts people and how there are no simple solutions.

This is the last gasp of shorts from Fantastic Fest.

Night (2021): Ahmed Saleh’s Night is based on the true story of a Palestinian mother and took four years to make, which you will realize is true after seeing how detailed the stop motion animation is. Hiam Abbass is the voice of the mother, Salma Saleh is her daughter and Night is played by Rafia Oraidi.

The idea of this film is that Night has to fool the Mother into sleeping to save her soul as war rages all around. This lives up to its title — it’s very dark in tone — and the music is beyond sumptuous. It’s haunting throughout and tells its story in an incredibly effective way.

I’d love to see a behind the scenes to learn how this was made.

O, Glory! (2022): Directed and written by Joe Williams and Charlie Edwards-Moss, this is the story of a psychiatric doctor and his assistant who have been summoned to an isolated country house to examine Deborah (Emily Stott), whose brother believes is losing her mind.

The three men find themselves in the grip of her psychosis — or is it theirs? — as they try to help her. Shot in rural England and infused with folk horror, this shot on 35mm short is gorgeous, this could — and should — be a full length movie.

Return to Sender (2022): Director and writer Russell Goldman and producer Jamie Lee Curtis were inspired by things ordered from Amazon that didn’t arrive or the wrong thing came instead. Goldman based Julia, the hero of this story, on his family’s history of addiction. She gets no support from customer service as her orders fail and ends up ruining not just her life, but someone else’s as well when she doesn’t get what she wanted.

Allison Tolman plays Julia and she’s great, just falling to pieces as she keeps getting the wrong packages which must be some grand conspiracy against her. This looks incredible and is better than most major movies I’ve seen this year.

Seafoam (2022): Directed, written by and starring Izzy Stevens, Seafoam explores a waking nightmare as Billy keeps seeing the same man (Jae Kim) after visiting her mother in a psychiatric health ward. By the end of the film, this descends into madness.

What it gets right is a really hard thing: the hours that seem to crawl by as you watch someone you love who is no longer there, telling you things that may not exist, as you keep watching their face for any inkling that they know who you are. And you know where they are now is where you will be someday very soon. This movie hit me a bit too hard.

Sucks to Be the Moon (2022): Creators Tyler March, Eric Paperth and Rob Tanchum have created an animated short in which the moon, tired of being lonely and in the shadow of the sun, decides to escape to meet other planets and falls in which a bad crowd — Pluto — and somehow comes back together to be friends with the Sun, only for both to realize just how important they are — were — to Earth.

This is a movie that has taught me that the universe is basically a club where all the planets hang out.

What have you been up to, Moon? “Hard drugs and crime.”

I’d say this was perfect for kids, but man, in no way should you let your kids watch it.

Tank Fairy (2021): In this short film by Erich Rettstadt, Marian Mesula plays the Tank Fairy, a magical woman who delivers tanks of gas with plenty of sass) to Jojo (Ryan Lin), a young man with a dream and the need for someone exactly like the Tank Fairy in his life.

This movie looks like foreign commercials or a strange TV show from a country you can’t place and you watch it while you eat and watch those wild music videos that some restaurants still play and I say that as a supreme compliment. Shot in Taiwan, it has energy, verve and, yes, sass. Also gas.

This movie feels like it could give someone that needs hope some hope.

Vertical Valor (2022): Directed and written by Alex Kavutskiy, Vertical Valor celebrates the lost heroes of World War 3: the skaters who stayed home and keep working on their ollie while delivering bad news to, well, the same dad over and over and over yet again. Man, I never knew I could have served in this unit, because I could rail grind and get some limited air even as a fat teenager. Perhaps my knowledge of sponsored riders and Misfits lyrics could have been put to service for my country. I could have read old issues of Thrasher to blind vets. Man, while I’m glad that we haven’t had a major world war — I mean, give 2022 time — I do know that I could have been part of the effort.

Zombie Meteor (2022):  Co-directors and writers José Luis Farias and Alfonso Fulgencio have taken the boredom I feel about zombies and made them fun again. Mar (Coral Balas) and Petrov (Iván Muelas) are in orbit on a space station when — you guessed it from the title — a meteor filled with zombies adds so much danger to their regular day.

I had no expectations about this. In fact, I thought from the description I’d not enjoy it. I will admit it. I was wrong, this was great and I’ll watch anything these creative forces make. You won me over, even if I’m still sick of zombies.

Keep your mind open and allow the living dead inside, I guess.

Get ready for another collection of shorts that I watched at Fantastic Fest.

The Blood of the Dinosaurs (2021): Once, we went to a Mystery Spot and after we walked toward the center of the room, it kept pushing us into the walls and I was young and trying to hold my mother’s hand and it made me cry. Then, we all got on a train and it went through a forest and animatronic dinosaurs appeared and the driver told us to reach under our chairs for guns to kill the rampaging lizards and I yelled and ran up and down the length of the train begging for people to stop and that we needed to study the dinosaurs and not kill them. This was not a dream.

Another story. I was obsessed with dinosaurs and planned on studying them, combining my love of stories of dragons like the Lamprey Worm with real zoology, but then nine-year-old me learned that they were all dead and I had to face mortality at a very young age which meant I laid in bed and contemplated eternity all night and screamed and cried so much I puked. This is also a true story.

The Blood of DInosaurs has Uncle Bobbo (Vincent Stalba) and his assistant Purity (Stella Creel) explain how we got the oil in our cars that choke the planet but first, rubber dinosaurs being bombarded by fireworks and if you think the movie gets boring from here, you’re so wrong.

Can The Beverly Hillbillies become ecstatic religion? Should kids have sex education? Would the children like to learn about body horror and giallo? Is there a show within a show within an interview and which reality is real and why are none of them and all of them both the answer? Did a woman just give birth to the Antichrist on a PBS kids show?

This is all a preview of Joe Badon’s full film The Wheel of Heaven and when I read that he was influenced by the Unarius Cult, my brain climbs out of my nose and dances around before I slowly strain to open my mouth and beg for it to come back inside where it’s wet and safe.

Badon co-wrote this film’s score and screenplay with Jason Kruppa and I honestly can’t wait to see what happens next. Also: this was the Christmas episode of Uncle Bobbo so I can only imagine that this was him being toned down.

The Blue Hour (2022): Jeremías Segovia directed and wrote this short in which a young woman — La Chica (Lucia Blasco) — is on the beach, waiting for the crowd to leave so that she can bathe in the nude. She believes that it’s just her and the ocean and that’s when she realizes that a shadow known only as El Joven (Juan Diego Eirea) is watching. This begins a battle of wills between the two with her keeping her body inside the rapidly cooling azure waves while he never averts his gaze. Who has the longer endurance and patience?

Segovia also made the shorts La Mujer Ruta and The Tooth Fairy. This is an intriguing premise and a gorgeous looking short.

The Businessman (2022): Lola (Liviya Meyers) is on the way home from school when she meets a salesman (Steven Gamble) who looks to instill the fear of financial insecurity into her and convince her to sell ancient fashion magazines for him. Director and writer Nathan Ginter also made Last Seen and this has some great atmosphere and a genuinely strange feel throughout, feeling at once modern and out of time.

What if capitalism itself was the monster of a supernatural movie out to coerce teenagers to do its occult bidding? That’s this movie and it looks, feels and plays out so well.

Chicks (2022): Geena Marie Hernandez directed and wrote this tale of a “girly, cotton-candy colored slumber party” that transforms into an occult ritual when Polly (Nikole Davis) is invited to join the popular upper echelon of high school royalty for a sleepover. Yet Lizzie (Jena Brooks), Kelly (Maddie Moore) and Jazz (Lilliana Simms) have plans for her and honestly, I could see the witch elements rolling in but I had no idea where this was going, nor did I get the pun of the title until the end of the film. I’ll let you go in as blind as I was, but man, this looks great, like a pink candy nightmare and the end is wonderful. Well done.

The Community (2022): Milos Mitrovic and Eric Peterson also made Unidentified Objects, a great film that played Fantastic Fest. This is a 48 Hour Film Fest movie turned into a short that stars Adam Brooks (the director of Astron-6’s Father’s Day and The Editor, as well as Doctor Scorpius in Manborg and the dad in Psycho Goreman) as a man seeking something precious and using an informant (Mitrovic) to get it. It’s an absurd short that is quick and to the point, while being pretty enjoyable.

Cruise (2022): I worked in a survey research telemarketing place before I got into advertising and it’s the kind of job that still gives me nightmares. We had a set script that we had to follow, a mysterious room had people listening to us and you didn’t even get to call the number. It would just ring, you’d ask someone if they got their sample of laundry detergent, then they would call you an asshole for ten seconds, then you’d start all over again for ten hours at a time. Often, one of those mystery people would tell you that you were off script and take over and show you how. The worst was if you made a human connection at any point, they would terminate your call. I still wake up thinking that I’m late for my job there, a room of cubicles and no windows and people plugged into headsets as blood for the machine.

Cruise, directed and written by Samuel Rudykoff, finds telemarketer after telemarketer trying to sell a cruise and failure means death.

These days, when scam likely comes up on my phone, I don’t get mad or rude to the people on the other line. I was once them. It was not fun. And, as this movie will show you, you may end up getting them shot right in the head.

Deerwoods Deathtrap (2022): Shot on Super 8, this tells the story of Jack and Betty Gannon, who were on a trip to Cape May, New Jersey in 1971 when they somehow survived being hit by a train. Even wilder, everyone in the car, like an elderly grandmother, an infant daughter and a young son — director James Gannon — all lived. Now, fifty years later, they have returned to a place they barely lived to tell from even if they can’t agree on what really happened.

This is an incredible short, filled with humor and darkness. But the best part is the closing line: “Guess what?  People do get hit by fucking trains.”

This definitely made me rethink when I cross those tracks down by Sheetz.

East End (2022): Director Grant Curatola’s East End looks like a late 70s to early 80s slasher and does something wonderful: It takes a crime in a small town and inflates it via the telephone game, as what may not be the worst crime of all time eventually becomes a horrific story that the entire town can’t stop talking about, all set to the music cues from Psycho. A fun idea, told well.

The Event (2022): Co-directed by Frank Mosley and writer Hugo De Sousa, who also appear in this film along with Jennifer Kim, this has Vincent (De Sousa) and Jack (Mosely), roommates and best friends, going back and forth over a short film that Vincent has made. Why hasn’t his friend watched it? Sure, it’s 2 AM, but come on, it’s the greatest thing he’s ever made, the joy of his life. And if he has a long way of explaining things that involves pasta, then so be it. But man, let Beatrice (Kim) sleep!

This hits harder than I would like to admit, because I want my wife to appreciate the work that I do or things that I write and she just says, “OK,” as she looks up from some phone game. Heartbreaking.

Everybody Goes to the Hospital (2021): This is an absolutely terrifying movie, the stop motion animated story of 4-year-old Little Mata (writer/director Tiffany Kimmel’s mother, as this is based on a true story) as she gets so sick that she has to go to the hospital in late 1963 with appendicitis and things get worse from there.

I don’t even know how you can recover from getting every single one of your organs taken out of your body and cleaned, but somehow this brave little child did. I was completely not prepared to be repeatedly emotionally barraged by this well-crafted short.

I just spent some time with my dad at an appointment in a hospital after watching this and man, I kept remembering the details of this movie. It stays with you.

Ex Creta (2022): No pun intended, but holy shit, this movie was great. Seriously, so unexpected and yeah, it’s a four-minute-long movie about a scatological artist but I don’t care. It made me laugh more times in a short period than some full-length movies dream of being able to do. Also: the dog!

Olivia Puckett, Emily Kron and Gabrielle Anise are great voice talents as well, moving the story so well while director and writer Jon Portman has crafted a singular work of art.

Buzkill (2022): Let me tell you, when you start your animated short off with a logo that says Canon Pictures and looks like Cannon Films, I’m going to love what comes next.

That said, it’s easy to love this movie, which is the story of Becky (Kelly McCormack, who is Jess McCready in the A League of Their Own Series) and Rick (Peter Ahern, also the director and writer), who return to her house after a date and their moment of romance is interrupted by an insect crawling out of her eyeball.

The animation is gorgeous, the story is amusing and I just loved the way that it all pays off. Buzzkill gets in more gross-out and laugh-out-loud moments in its short running time than most movies get in two hours.

Fantastic Fest’s patented bipedal program of short-subject cinema that buck conventions and blur boundaries of genre, aesthetics and taste returns with a barrage of provocative peculiarities. Expect the unexpected, but prepare for an array of unique sensibilities — from the polished to the anarchic — as absurdism and experimentation abound and silliness co-mingles with severity.

Alegrías Riojanas (2022): Experimental filmmaker Velasco Broca has created a short where an ophthalmologist has his urgent need for a confession interrupted when the priest leaves. Growing tired of waiting, he returns to his office and is killed by a car. Then, his soul travels through a purgatory populated by horrifying demons and devils. Where will his journey take him?

This movie is at once frightening and gorgeous. It’s unlike anything else I saw at Fantastic Fest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YflSkvlJoNw

Amor to Love (2022): Taco Bell’s new Grilled Stuft Corazon-a-rito. They say it has three layers of cheesy admiration and sizzling hot passionate ground beef all grilled to deep perfection. Yes, somehow, this was a film made for Taco Bell, but you know, as much as I hate corporations I for some reason I give a pass to Taco Bell. I mean, bean burritos. They’ve been a staple in my diet since I was a child, which is possibly why I’m so fat and fart so often. Also: this movie was fun. You can learn more at the official site.

The Breakdown Parables (2021): Directed and written by Emil Benjamin, this tells the story of a purgatory casting office, as the receptionist (Maria DeCotis) sees appointment after appointment. Through five stories, the actors within the waiting room experience a variety of human emotions as well as baring their truest self; anything in the pursuit of that big part, right? Does the receptionist have dreams of her own? Can anyone be friends in the business of show? Will this all end with a musical number? Is heaven real? Man, that’s a lot of questions. This answers at least a few of them. I certainly had no expectations of this, but if I did, they would have been exceeded. You can learn more at the official site.

From Water Comes Melon (2022): Micah Vassau directed and wrote this tale of the last watermelon on Earth. A young woman discovers it and must decide whether to keep it for herself or share it with the rest of what’s left of humanity. Also, rampant nudity for some reason. I never thought I’d watch a movie about post-apocalyptic watermelons appearing on a beach, but life is incredibly odd and I love that.

Hubbards (2021): There’s a guy who digs every day in a quest to find his brother’s bones. When he needs the sustenance it takes to excavate sibling skeleton parts in the dusty sand and dirt, well, he turns to Hubbards. You may as well. This was a four-part journey into weirdness that I enjoyed and wouldn’t mind watching again.

I Dreamed I Heard a Song Called Habibi (2022): An experimental mixed-media vibe that ruminates on technology, theater and transformation set to a soundscape by Your 33 Black Angels and directed by Benji Kast. It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine referred to the music of this band as “Part XTC, part New Order, part VU; like Galaxie 500 being beaten up by Kraftwerk and the Wu-Tang Clan.” This animation was pretty wild. Check it out:

Precautionary Measure (2021): Created by Lizzy Deacon and Ika Schwander, this tells the story of Helen, who wins a life coaching session in a raffle at her local village hall. What follows is her life coach Helen guiding her through the help she never really needed. Together, they will explore healing strategies to cope with fear, rejection and grief. Maybe they’ll help one another. Maybe it’ll be a mess. They say the unexamined life is not worth living, but who are they anyway?

The Straight Ball (2022): Eugene Kotlyarenko and Nate Wilson made this story about a date that’s filled with information as it falls to pieces. It kind of gave me PTSD, reminding me that I’m really lucky that I’m inside on a cold Sunday night with my wife and not failing to connect with any other person. For that, this movie has made me very thankful.