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How sad is this?

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

...about the perception of the other. about the stranger in a foreign small town. about the responsability. about the relation with the other. significant - the feeling after its end. not just surprising. but different by what you could expect. and, after the last scene, all becomes coherent. the baredom, the pills, the accident. and that does it remarkable. as show. as warning. so,, maybe, a parable.

"Still Life" (not to be mistaken for the 2013 Marsan movie) is a short film directed by Jon Knautz, written by Charles Johnston and starring Trevor Matthews from roughly 10 years ago. Nother of the trio is very famous, although you may have come across the director or star if you have seen the Robert Englund horror comedy "Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer".Anyway, in this short movie we see a man driving for a bit until he hits somebody with his car, probably because he was very sleep and took some pills. He gets out right away to see what happened when he realizes the victim is a dummy. When he gets in a nearby shop or café to ask for help, it is full with dummies sitting there anyway. When he looks away for a second and looks back, he sees the dummies have moved and are all looking at him now. This I found the most intense moment of the film, more intense than the violence afterward, as for the first time we realize something is very wrong in a truly spooky manner. The snowy weather and barren landscape helps the atmosphere.Later on, he gets in a fight and kills a couple dummies with a baseball bat. Now, I am not sure I entirely understood this short film. I thought the protagonist was hallucinating from the medication, which would explain the dummies, but does not explain why they stand still every time he looks at them, especially the family father when he is in motion with the baseball bat. Maybe there is something more to it. In the end, probably with the effects of the drugs slowly fading, everything becomes real again. The blood is the first indicator, the cops are the second and the corpses are the final one. Man, is he in trouble now.What I liked about these 9 minutes was the clever way they packed brutal violence in it, but still made it watchable for younger audiences. Another thing I thought about was the idea that every time we look somewhere, everything happens where we don't look. For example, the very second you read my review, probably somebody gets beaten up with a baseball bat and you don't see it. Anyway, I enjoyed this short film. it is far from perfect, but makes for a good watch. Recommended.

Being told this was a horror film, I was a bit skeptical as to how this film would play out in the opening scene. When our main character hit what appeared to be a mannequin and tried to get help with the results only making the man seem even crazier, the man's pill popping in the car finally made sense. By the end of it all, it ended up being a brutal depiction of what some sort of fictional drugs can do to people. I like some aspects of the screenplay such as the fact that it kept you guessing what would happen to the main character next in the creepy town of moving mannequins. This really kept my interest which most dialogue-less movies don't do. Overall, this was a good short film, but it wasn't exactly the greatest thing I've ever seen so I give it an 8 out of 10.

This great short film has left me wanting more. I would love to see Rod Serling introduce this film and in turn learn a bit more about the main character and how he feels about his experiences in that small town. This movie is built around an interesting concept which is delivered very effectively as a psychological thriller. The idea of a sparsely populated small town works very well as the setting here and the winter season only adds to the setting and tone of the movie. I am left to wonder where the lead character comes from and the series of events that lead him to this small town. As stated earlier I would love to see this as a longer feature to get some of these questions answered. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for future BrookStreet productions.