When Billie (Marnie McKendry) — sorry, I mean children — microwaves raw hamburger meat, it needs no old top hat to come to life. Instead, Meat Friend (Steve Johanson, who co-wrote this with director Izzy Lee) is alive and real and wants to teach her some valuable life lessons rooted in hatred and violence, no matter what her mother (Megan Duffy) does.

“More beef! Less cheese!” goes the refrain and the faithful demand the reanimation of the meat homunculus.

This was an absolute blast of strange and exactly what I needed during the fest, something that started odd and didn’t let up.

Izzy Lee has also directed the Lovecraft film Innsmouth, the “For a Good Time, Call…” segment in Shevenge and several shorts like Consider the Titantic, Disco Graveyard and Memento Mori. You can learn more about this movie — the kind of magic that has a pile of sentient 80% lean ground beef do rails of coke — right here.

Directed and written by Ryan McGlade, Buddymovie has two old friends meeting up once again in the forest, discussing their past moments of being pals and then dealing with a large steel warehouse that’s full of demeaning wisecracks.

This is a quick one, but driven by some sharp dialogue more than the cinematography. Can a building have a crisis? Well, if corporations can have the same legal protection as people, sure. I guess anything is fair game these days.

Do you have trouble making friends? Then you might find something in this movie to learn from.

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.

When Sophie Stark uploads her silicon artwork online — it takes the Furby toy of the past and reinvents it in organic and often disturbing ways — she becomes a viral success and goes into business full-time selling her creations.

I really loved Pacey Hansen’s film, as it makes one confront the expected nature of a toy from the past but when the expectation of what we see it as is changed by removing the fur or making it out of other organic matter, it becomes upsetting to some. When the familiar changes just enough, it edges toward horror, as if we skipped directly from Mickey Mouse’s first incarnation and then never saw the steps to where he is today. The streamlining would hurt our eyes.

You can learn more at the official Facebook page.

You can see Sophie Stark’s artwork on her official page and Instagram. To see videos of her work being created, visit her YouTube page.

There’s a first part of this — Cubed Row is the second issue in the ongoing series This Space Space — so I have no idea how much I’ve missed, but judging on how little of this I could comprehend, I’m going to say it was a metric fuckton.

Wilde and the other beings discover the structure and inevitable collapse of the Ovra, which means that these aliens all dressed in form-fitting costumes must now work to continue all existence from, well, existing.

This anthology series is supposedly not connected, so maybe I didn’t miss anything. I’ll be on the lookout for whatever comes next, because it was so delightfully weird.

You can learn more on the official Facebook page.

Directed by Patrick Scopick, this short sounds like 2000s Evanescence and goes completely over the top as a young woman wakes up from a nightmare and begins working her way through a strange new world. This feels — again — as mid-2000s Hot Topic as it gets and I say that with perhaps some nostalgia.

Just look at the description the filmmakers give: “A musical odyssey inside a strange world torn apart by psychedelic incoherence, where music alters reality.”

Wake me up indeed.

The artist whose music makes up this short, A Band Named Desire, state that “The Laws of Nature are written by the act of Observation. If a mass hallucination were induced, an incoherence would be created. We would no longer be spectators of reality, but rather, the authors of it.”

You can see some more of the videos that make up this movie on their Instagram and YouTube pages.

There’s definitely some talent from everyone in this. And it’s definitely earnest. Your mileage may vary based on how much Nightwish and Lacuna Coil you’ve listened to.

In this claymation short, a man discovers that the minutes and hours tick down at his mundane job, he is growing older and can’t stop it from happenig. Is there any purpose in his life? Or is he a cog turning toward oblivion?

Are all of our jobs just pushing the same red button over and over again? If I miss one paycheck, my life would tumble into a decline that I could never recover from, my rock I push up the hill rolling over and over me, grinding me into wet bones, as I struggle even now to make payments on bills that grow larger than the roof of my home.

So I get it. Even if I’m not made of clay and pushing a red button.

“There’s a room where the light won’t find you. Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down. When they do, I’ll be right behind you.”

Writers, directors and stars Addie Doyle — who plays Bob — and Lee Hurst — who plays Joe — have survived the end of the world only to battle over who rules the world, whatever is left of it, and then one of the last living mice on Earth gets killed and the two fight it out.

Basically, if our current apocalypse has taught me anything, the armageddon in this movie is much more likely than anything in Mad Max. 

I really liked how this all came together. It took me a bit of time to get on board, but by the end, I wanted this to be a much longer film.

The Chattanooga Film Fest ends tomorrow at 11:59 PM EDT. To get a Last Gasp Pass for just $32, visit the official site now.

By a stream in the woods that exists between between worlds, two women — played by Amanda Seyfried and Sharon Washington — meet one another as they stand ankle deep in the water. It is a time of letting go of where they have been and discovering the world that is to come in this meditative and beautiful short film.

Directed by Samantha Soule and written by Daniel Talbott, who also worked on the upcoming films Midday Black Midnight Blue and Ain’t It Though together, this was a nice moment of zen amongst the normal blood and sleaze that runs in this home theater.

The Chattanooga Film Fest ends tomorrow at 11:59 PM EDT. To get a Last Gasp Pass for just $32, visit the official site now.

Based on the Carlton Mellick III novel Every Time We Meet at the Dairy Queen, Your Whole Fucking Face Explodes, this movie lives up to its title because there’s a cute boy named Ethan and there’s a cute girl with strange eyes and spiders in her hair and they go on a cute date and then her face fucking explodes. It lives up to the title and then some.

This whole movie is the sweetest of ice cream, jet age Americana and Disney Channel-looking teenage daydream glitter-coated make your heart flutter romcom and then, you know, faces fucking explode.

There aren’t enough stars to rate this movie.

Plus: Anthony Cousins, who directed and wrote this, also made “The Night He Came Back Again! Part IV: The Final Kill” in the near-perfect Scare Package.

The Chattanooga Film Fest ends tomorrow at 11:59 PM EDT. To get a Last Gasp Pass for just $32, visit the official site now.