Zero

ZeroMom sitting on the living room sofa in an NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) suit is certainly a conversation starter in the independent short, Zero.

And the conversations continue in this, a serious, heady outbreak short.

The mom says “don’t scream, run or freak out,” to her daughters while her sullen husband looks on and there’s a “certain something” she has to show them.

And what a something it is.

It turns out their younger brother is a hissing, snapping, shell of his former pre-teen self and he’s been strapped to his bed a la Procrustes. He has no pulse, no cognitive thought and lives pretty free-range in that he only eats living meat.

How the family copes with this calamity and the need to put this not-quite-human-anymore thing out of its misery, is what Zero explores over a short, but tense and well-acted 15 minutes.

Is it bad to say we had “zero” expectations? (hey, we get a lot of stuff sent our way).

The film really comes into its own when the mom asks her kids to commit fratricide, or more accurately, to help her commit filicide when “that thing kept biting back at me.”

More a rumination on end-of-life issues than a virus flick, Zero is well-worth a look.

It’s gotta be said that Zero (along with Naked Zombie Girl, the other short we reviewed) looks absolutely terrific and better than many feature-length flicks.

***1/2 (out of 5)

iMurders

iMurdersIn iMurders you get to see Billy Dee Williams gleefully read aloud BBMs. You also get to witness the thrill of hearing someone explain what they can do with a Blackberry (read emails! check stock quotes!). As a companion to this review, check out our iMurders Blubrry podcast discussion, Social Media and Horror Movies.

Rather than a satirical examination of the impact new media (not even new but already obsolescent during filming, 2008) has had on our psyches, we get a dull police procedural jerry-rigged around digital extensions of ourselves. Criminal Minds, Law & Order: SVU and 20/20 beat iMurders to the punch by several years so that presumably every housewife in America knew about the sinister evils lurking about online before this stinker got around to it. Called “a must own” by Horrorsociety.com, this is more of a disown.

As Keats remarked about the last piece of disruptive technology, the car — it gave the average American the opportunity “to make himself more and more common.”

Slumming would-be university dean William Forsythe (The Devil’s Rejects/Dick Tracy) is Dr. Uberoth, a ridiculously ponytailed Liberal Arts professor, garrulous cad and Hemingway buff who is obsessed with chat room banalities. Every night he trades in his wife’s companionship for a site, Facespace (a hopelessly lame portmanteau cashing in on the Myspace and Facebook phenomena) to exchange bon mots with perfect strangers who are perfectly dull.

There are other obsessives too, Del Gado (Billy Dee Williams) a litigator and perky/cute Sandra, a harried corporate event planner.

There you have it: three highly successful, very busy people who talk for a living, talking obsessively in their free time as well, getting lost in a chat room rabbit hole (Ironically Sandra’s new beau, a retired shut-in of all people, doesn’t even own a computer!)

She teachers her nosy landlord/superintendent (an Edie Falco lookalike — this is set mostly in New Jersey after all) the underground wonders of cyberspace, while two preternaturally good-looking women spend countless hours online yakking with the lecherous lawyer and ponderous prof (one of whom, Janet, sees therapist Dr. St. Martin, played by Charles Durning. Why, oh why?)

All the while, members of the chat room are being systematically butchered while the last ones remaining, receive threatening IMs.

“Everyone is a suspect…until they get murdered.”

Not particularly, as the denouement is fairly obvious.

Hammy, horrible, cheap and cynical.

*1/2 (out of 5)