Killer Party: Bad 80s slasher turns into a bad Exorcist rip-off in the last half hour. Not available on DVD. 2/10

Rawstock is a short film festival that is put on throughout the year. Each Rawstock event features a fresh batch of top quality short films from around the world. The first showing of the year was March 5th and it featured eleven short films.

Short films are made for a variety of reasons. Traditionaly short films have a limited market. They are shown at film festivals to a few hundred people and rarely go beyond. The internet has opened up the opportunity to get a wider audience but there still is not a lot of financial return for the short film maker. So why make a short film? Short films can introduce a character or story idea that can translate into a feature film. Once the short is complete it can be shown to financial backers to entice investment in the feature film. “I Sell the Dead” took this route and even used the entire short in the feature film. Making a Short, can be a great way to practice your craft and put together a team for future projects. If something or someone is not working out you can make adjustments before going into a feature project. There are also a few filmmakers that just love to focus only on short films. The Seattle group ‘Pucker’ makes 5-6 short films a year and are releasing them as a collection on DVD.

The films shown at Rawstock run the gambit. I can see several of them as features and others were just great fun films.

David Lobser’s ‘Elephant Girl’ showcases his unique highly stylized animation. It is a cross between ‘Hello Kitty’ and ‘A Nightmare Before Christmas’. Checkout dlobser.com to see full versions of some of his other shorts.

Darrius Scheider, one of the event’s cordinators, showed ‘The Schlockmann Method’ which is the third film in his ‘Towel Trilogy’. It was fun to watch but don’t expect to see the feature any time soon.

Cream, a sketch comedy crew from Los Angeles, contributed ‘We Got That B-Roll’. They have a flair for making silly films and love to parody commericials, reality TV and anything normally serious. You can find more of their work on funnyordie.com

My favorite film of the evening was ‘I Love Sarah Jane’. If you think you’ve seen it all when it comes to Zombie flicks then this one is for you. The only survivors of the Zombie hoard are a group of kids. They keep the last remaining Zombie chained up in the back yard and have fun with teasing and torturing it. The subplot is a kids crush on a slightly older girl played by Mia Wasikowska. The film works because in only 14 minutes the filmmaker introduces us to a world with well developed characters behaving in a believable fashion.

The night concluded with an after party at Liberty Bar.

This was a great evening of film, drinks and networking with other film lovers. Join their facebook group to find out about future events- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=50208338259&ref=ts

Spencer and John give their review of Cop Out, look back on the career of Michael Moore in honor of the release of Capitalism: A Love Story, and give their DVD picks of the week.

For his DVD pick of the week John selected one of the MacGuffin Film Podcasts’ top films of the year, Up In The Air (DVD/Blu-ray). In contrast, Spencer selected the indie darling, Precious (DVD/Blu-ray).

This episode is also available on iTunes.

Transsiberian: Suspenseful thriller in the vein of Hitchcock. Good performances by all and solid direction by Brad Anderson. 8/10

In Transsiberian, Woody Harrelson and his wife (Emily Mortimer) are leaving a missions trip in China and taking the Transsiberian express train across China and Russia to see the countryside, such as it is. The couple gets another couple as cabinmates who are a bit creepy.

The creepy girl, from Seattle oddly enough, is clearly alarmed when her boyfriend hands over his well-used passport while comparing them to Woody’s. Woody is playing a country bumpkin from Iowa and sadly, isn’t nearly as endearing as he was from Cheers. And actually, Woody is pretty unconvincing as an actor in this film, which isn’t a surprise to anyone who has seen him act since Cheers.

The cabinmate Carlos and Emily appear to be getting quite close on the trip and the Seattle girlfriend begins to get suspicious. But the girlfriend still manages to crack the surface of Emily by asking about her past. Apparently, Emily has a criminal and drug- and alcohol-filled past. Woody confides in Carlos that they are having marital problems – basically that she doesn’t want kids and such. Woody disappears and Emily thinks he’s been left at the previous train station.

The trio spends the night in a small town to wait for the next train with Woody on it. Carlos is obviously making moves on Emily and she’s not exactly shutting him down. Carlos leads Emily out into the woods where there are no witnesses and things start to get creepy. Carlos makes a serious and angry move on Emily and she smacks him in the head a couple of times with a branch and kills him and leaves him in the snow.

She heads back to wait for Woody and doesn’t tell anyone she left the body in the woods. After she’s reunited with Woody, they hop back on the train and their new cabinmate is Ben Kingsley – a Russian police officer. Strangely, Carlos has filled Emily’s bag with drug-filled Russian dolls and Emily is trying to off-load them at every opportunity. It’s not going well, especially under the watchful eye of the police detective. As the detective gets more suspicious, he begins interrogating the couple in an increasingly aggressive manner. It gets brutal.

I won’t ruin the ending of this one, but it gets a little convoluted towards the end. The film isn’t a bad one, though it does take a while to get rolling and is a bit drawn out. I kept watching the clock and hoping it would be over soon. The acting by everyone except Woody is decent, and there are some intense moments followed by some lulls. The story is bit unbelievable, though that’s nothing new I Hollywood (or Russia, maybe). The music seemed appropriate except for when Woody was on screen, then sometimes it got hokey, like the music people were insulting him subtly. Hilarious. The film is supposed to be some sort of travel adventure murder mystery, but is a weak attempt at suspense. Then again, it’s Woody Harrelson and he’s hard to believe in a lot of films. I’m not sure I’d recommend this to a lot of people. It was watchable, but not really that likable.

(2 out of 5 fus)

Visiting Hours: Great cast including Michael Ironside and Lee Grant make this exploitation piece seem a little more like an A picture. 6/10

The Crazies (2010): A modern horror remake that’s better than the original and a solid movie in its own right? You betcha. 8/10

Spencer and John look back on the career of Kevin Smith in honor of the release of Cop Out. Next, they discuss the recent crop of horror remakes in honor of The Crazies release. Finally, they give their DVD picks of the week.

For his DVD pick of the week John selected the DVD release of the John Carpenter mini-series Elvis, starring Kurt Russell. Spencer went for more recent fare and selected the disaster film, 2012 (DVD/Blu-ray).

This episode is also available on iTunes.

Bart Got a Room is one of those teen high school comedies similar to SuperBad or Napoleon Dynamite. Danny is a regular kid with divorced parents and he’s trying to find a date for the senior prom. He attempts to ask a couple of girls including a sophomore cheerleader who changes clothes in his car regularly when he drives her home from school. Alia Shawkat co-stars in this film and she’s trying to get Danny to go to the prom with her (the guy is a complete moron for not taking her up on the offer – she’s smoking hot). All of Danny’s prom dates bail on him and he’s going to surprise Alia, but he then finds out one of his friends asked her. So the dad, played by William H. Macy, drops everything (including a date with the smoking hot Jennifer Tilly) to find his son a date.

It’s a tiny bit zany but it’s good clean fun. The acting in it is pretty amusing and kind of has a feel like “But I’m a Cheerleader” (which I’ve never made THAT comparison before, I assure you – but that’s what I thought of when I saw this film). It’s also got fun color treatment on the camera shots that make it kind of pop in a whitewashed sort of way. The comedy is mid-brow (as opposed to low brow or high brow) and will have you chuckling through much of the film. Make sure you watch for the boom mic operator in the final scene. Not the mic itself – the ACTUAL STAGE GUY made it into a shot and I can’t figure out how they missed it in editing. Weird. Good fun film that’s pretty non-offensive to most people.

(4 out of 5 fus) (1 star specifically for Alia Shawkat)

The Crazies (1973): A great premise is not developed enough by the script and some bad acting brings it down a notch, but still OK. 6/10