♦ — post author — Immortal Alexander —♦
Immoral Alexander here with another creeptastic review.
This week I am talking about a horror short film that was sent to us from the new production company, Unmanned Media. The film is called End of the Road and it stars Daniel Van Thomas. Miss. Andromeda and I are familiar with him from his work in the zombie horror western Revelation Trail. I’ll leave a link to that review below. It also stars Tatum Langton who appeared in the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy.”
End of the Road
Synopsis
Betsy, a small-town waitress (Tatum), offers a warm meal to an enigmatic drifter (Van Thomas) in a rundown diner. Little does she know she’s let a vicious and calculative werewolf loose on the diner’s colorful population.
In this Little Red Riding Hood story Betsy helps a drifter by offering to buy him a meal at her local diner. The man turns into a werewolf and chaos ensures. There’s not much to spoil since the whole story is summed up in the synopsis on imdb. It’s a pretty bare bones premise and the short is only 11 min long but that does not mean there isn’t some bloody good fun to be had.
The Good
The performances were fun and entertaining. Betsy is a fairly convincing character even though she doesn’t get enough development before the blood starts to fly. This is primarily a creature feature so the story is placed in the passenger seat for the action and visuals to shine. The cook is also a standout as he gives one of the better performances.
The camera work and overall cinematography is done very well. There are some great compositions and the focus is always razor sharp (See what I did there. Werewolf pun.) The lighting is very good but the color grading made everything a little too dark for my taste. Still great imagery all around.
The digital and practical FX are the real star of this short. The blood, gore, and werewolf transformations were all amazing! Really stellar stuff. Body chunks, and blood fly everywhere in this thing.
The Bad
The whole short’s audio seems to have been re-recorded during post production. Without realistic sound that makes you feel like you are there, you are essentially cutting off one of your major story telling legs. The audio isn’t bad it’s just not done realistically. Usually you will mix the sound of the room your filmed in with other sound effects to fill in the space you are recreating. There are sound effects but everything sounds like it’s in a vacuum. Meaning dialog that sounds like it was recorded in a studio. Not on location. It definitely takes away from the atmosphere. The test for good audio is to close your eyes and listen to the sound of the film. If you can listen to the whole think and understand what is happening moment to moment without looking at the video then the sound is good.
The other character’s performances were pretty passable. The actors just didn’t have enough time to build their characters plus the dialog was kind of unrealistic.
Ok, rant over.
I can say I have made some of these same mistakes myself with my own short films. They are pretty common with low budget projects and don’t make the films bad per say but they do hold the films back from being amazing.
The Music
The music on the other hand was great. It really helped with the story telling. Especially in the end credits sequence.
Verdict
Overall I would give End of the Road, 3 out of 5 blood spattered stars. The camera work, lighting, and special FX, and music are all wonderful and make this short worth a watch by any creature loving horror fiend. I can’t wait to see what this studio does next. These guys are definitely going places. Dark and scary places of celluloid and gooey insides. Ok that was creepy… but the gore effects in this short were pretty freakin amazing. Enjoy!
Watch it
http://www.unmannedmedia.com/#eotr
Revelation Trail
(movie review by Jeanette Andromeda): http://bit.ly/1qO3nfD
End of the Road - a short with some serious teeth. #horror #indiefilm review ♦ --- post author --- Immortal Alexander ---♦ Immoral Alexander here with another creeptastic review. This week I am talking about a horror short film that was sent to us from the new production company, …