REVIEWS

SHORTS FROM THE 2005 INTERNATIONAL MONTREAL FILM FESTIVAL

Review by Stewart Andrews

In our seemingly spiralling culture of retardation where stupidity is celebrated as a virtue, it is becoming increasingly rare to discover genuinely thought provoking horror films that reverberate long after being viewed. But such is the case with British mini shocker. Clocking in at a scant six minutes without a word of dialogue or a single frame wasted, Sam Walker’s masterfully executed exercise in pure, expressionistic horror depicts a nightmare factory where a barely cognizant assembly line worker mechanically lops off one human head after another, completely oblivious to the reality and consequence of his robotically executed atrocities. The sight of the freshly severed heads, piling up in the bin, still blinking leaves one feeling thoroughly corrupted and most unclean. Much more than a statement against the meat industry this brilliantly stylized short comments directly on our collective conditioned senselessness, where a great many of us can neither afford to, nor are capable of, contemplating the larger implications of what it is that we actually contribute to humanity as a whole

Kate Stables finds the pick of July's short films on the web

A quick round of applause please for the Film Four website, for holding out against the sea of crap that laps at Cybercinema's inbox, and for featuring short films of consistently high quality and occasionally, frankly unparalleled weirdness. Chief among them is this latest offering from Sam Walker, who is our new crush (we've already mooned over the equally bizarre and violent Duck Children) and whose grisly, blood-spattered factory-line fiction had us flinching and laughing in equal measures. In this Grand Guignol comedy about the banality of evil, one clock-watching executioner is all that stands between his victim and freedom - since, rather Britishly, everything

Channel 4 review

Sam Walker's eccentric experimental film, in which a young girl finds herself trapped in an endless clockwork pantomime which becomes a bloodbath, is not for the faint of heart. But like the other films in his twisted trio of shorts (Pool Shark and Tea Break) it casts a kind of creepy enchantment over the viewer, like a Grimm fairytale with shotguns instead of magic shoes. Notwithstanding its shoestring budget of £400, it's a remarkably good-looking and original piece, filled with offbeat visual touches like the flock of vast, grotesque papier-mache heads which fill the audience, bobbing approval throughout their grisly entertainment. It won the Canal Plus prize at Clermont-Ferrand in 2002, should you require any more persuadingstops for tea.

www.twitchfilm.net

Tea Break: absolutely fantastic production design and attention to detail in this deadpan black comedy about a bored worker plodding through his day waiting for his tea break. The fact that his job involves decapitating the living people rolling his way on a conveyor belt doesn't seem to phase him in the slightest.