Macabre Manor

If you're a fan of cinéma vérité and tv horror hosts (and who isn't?) then Macabre Manor is what you should be watching right now.

For fans of spoofy campy spookiness, this delivers.

You never know what you're going to get with indie productions. So I went into this with pretty low expectations. Much to my pleasant surprise, Macabre Manor is a affectionate and consistently funny send-up of low-budget horror programming. The script is sharp and witty. The lead actors seem theater-trained and handle the surprisingly sophisticated dialogue with aplomb. Much care and thought seems to have been put into script, casting, costuming and set design. Particularly good are Jennifer Andrada and Katie Maloney with their rapid fire exchanges and flair for comedy, but everyone hits their comic beats. It also feels like everybody involved had a blast making it, and that wink wink nudge nudge feeling is transmitted to the viewer. It's perfect late night popcorn, have-friends-over entertainment. This never goes in quite the direction I think it's going to go, which is a big part of the fun. It keeps the viewer guessing. What zany off-the-wall gag are they going to try next? I'd love to see it catch on. In fact, it reminded me of the early days of SCTV.

Not really sure what the theme of this short film is supposed to be. If it's horror then it fails miserably. If it's humor then it also fails miserably because the people who made it clearly have no idea what's funny. Martin Scorsese once said that you don't need a million dollars to make a movie, you just need a camera and a good idea. The filmmakers clearly had a camera, but sadly, no idea. All technical ability is pointless if you don't have a story to tell, or a sense of humor to make the audience laugh, so this thing is pretty much an empty box. I'm sure it entertained the people who made it and made them feel like filmmakers, but that's about it.