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HI-8: HORROR INDEPENDENTS 8
Produced by Ron Bonk,Donald Farmer, Sven Garnlund, Matt Hill, Alaine Huntington, Tony Masiello, Claude Miles, Tim Ritter, Jonathan Straiton, Brad Sykes, and Josephina Syles
Directed by Ron Bonk, Donald Farmer, Marcus Koch, Tony Masiello, Tim Ritter, Chris Seaver, Todd Sheets, and Brad Sykes
Written by Ron Bonk, Donald Farmer, Matt Hill, Alaine Huntington, Marcus Kock, Tim Ritter, Chris Seaver, Todd Sheets, and Brad Sykes
Longtime B-Independent family member Scott Roberts once told me that I'm far more lenient on low-budget films than I am on big budget productions. I didn't agree with him at the time, but looking back he was on the money. Took me years to realize that I simply had more fun with microcinema. After my extended sabbatical away from the Shot-On-Video scene, HI-8 (a.k.a. HORROR INDEPENDENT 8) is the perfect movie to dip my toes back into the water. It's like a B-Independent jamboree filled with family members, both immediate and extended, from the early 2000's. It's was great to catch up with folks I haven't heard from in years and see what they're doing today. I'm pleased to learn that all have stayed busy and have grown as filmmakers. Going in, I thought I could peg each filmmaker's style as the shorts played out, but it was as if some of the filmmakers involved were deliberately deviating from their established stylings and paying homage to their compatriots by using another filmmaker's voice. This just made everything more enjoyable.
"No Budget Films Presents..." written and directed by Brad Sykes is the wrap around, and concerns a group of friends getting together to shoot a Hi-8 SOV gore flick, but in reality a couple of film geeks want to take pictures of a pretty girl and use the old “making a movie” excuse. At least that's the story behind the vast majority of movies I was sent to review at B-Indie. Hell, that's the story behind most of my own college projects. After all these years, I'm surprised Brad still talks to me. He received the single harshest review I've ever written for his film MUTATION, but to his credit just shrugged it off. He's a classy guy, and a slick filmmaker. Brad designed "NBFP" as if each scene is punctuated by rest of the short films which come across as the direct inspiration for the movie the film geeks are trying to make.
"Switchblade Insane" from Tim Ritter (not just the nicest guy you'll meet but also the most selfless SOV filmmaker out there) revolves around a crazy wife stalking her serial killer husband. I never would have pegged this as Tim's contribution, but Chris Seaver's. It has the same sense of humor and manic energy I remember running through Seaver's early work. Knowing it's from Ritter, I can see Tim's love from 80's slasher films shinning through, and it's nice to see him lightening his tone and having some fun for a change.
"A Very Bad Situation" from Marcus Koch about a small group holed up in a garage while some sort of alien/zombie/demon invasion occurs. Marcus was the first person to ever send me their film for review, and since ROT he's gone on to make a name for himself as a gore effects man. "Situation" puts that effects knowledge to great use. It's short, punchy filmmaking that gets right to the point. There's so much story hinted at that the short feels like a self-contained scene from a much larger film, one that I would like to see some day.
There's a spititual link between "Switchblade Insane" and "A Very Bad Situation,” one Joel Wynkoop, the Laurence Olivier of the b-movie world. Wynkoop has appeared in work from both Ritter and Koch. Originally Ritter's babysitter nearly 40 years ago, the two maintained their friendship to make a number of no-budget classics in the 80's and 90's, most notably the TRUTH OR DARE series. Marcus gives Joel a cameo in the "Situation", and he's the closest thing HI-8 has to a star. In typical Wynkoop fashion, he's awesome!
"The Tape", from Tony Masiello, concerns a horror fan's discovery of a lost SOV title and his quest to find the makers. Masiello is the one name that I'm not familiar with, but his send up of "VHS hipsters" and the obsessive Bleeding Skull crowd is wickedly fun. Masiello hits so many of the conventions from the Hi-8 heyday ranging from faux snuff to meta-textual explorations of fantasy and reality in cinema. Before the credits corrected me, this is the short I initially pegged as being from Ritter as it follows his trend of "exploring institutions." In this case, that institution is "home video" and all it encompasses from the brick and mortar mom & pop rental shops to the videophiles who frequented them. A quick IMDb check shows that Masiello is that rare micro-budget bird who goes on to bigger things. His day job is as an effects technician on Hollywood mega-productions.
"Gang Them Style" from Ron Bonk is a hyper-stylized send up of 1980's action movies, and the single most enjoyable short in the set. A Snake Pliskin-type tries to rescue his Nana from a retire community during a zombie outbreak. Turns out old age doesn't mix with the Apocalypse. Usually, Bonk's films are even more serious than his friend Tim Ritter's, and it's nice to see him have some fun as well. Bonk displays a strong working knowledge of visual storytelling and how to use it for comedic effect.
Being used to Chris Seaver's more outrageous style, "Genre Bending" didn't feel like a Seaver film at first. Seaver starts his segment exploring the tropes of '90's SOV stalk and slash fetish films until, well, he "genre bends" and deviate into a more typical Seaver comedy, and a glorious one at that. His older work didn't always jive with my sense of humor due a heavy reliance on pop-culture references that were unclear to me, but the use of straightforward parody works well here in that it makes the film more accessible to a broader audience (that being me).
"The Request" from Todd Sheets concerns a radio deejay and his lost love. My dealings with Todd over the years have been limited to the occasional e-mail every couple of years, but he remains the filmmaker who I received the most questions about from horror fans in the early days of B-Indie. In the SOV gore scene, his legend knows no end. "The Request" was easy to peg as Sheets' contribution as the dialog casually mentions some of Todd's movie titles. The most dramatic short of the bunch, it feels like the most personal story contributed.
"Thicker Than Water" from Donald Farmer concerns a killer couple's torture of the man's old flame. I'm more familiar with Farmer's later shot of film work than his his early video features, but those that have seen his early SOV work devoutly love it. If only I had a nickle for every time someone called those early works, “bonkers.” “TTW” explores romantic paranoia and the lengths the insecure will go to to preserve the family unit, and contains some insightful commentary on today's dating scene. It is by far the most uncomfortable short in HI-8 to watch, and it's effectiveness is centered around a stellar performance by Alaine Huntington as a possessive domestic partner/psycho. Huntington perfectly balances her character's most frightening aspects with Farmer's sense of humor. She also gets all the best lines, with my favorite being one concerning Drain-O and “bitches” being “full of shit.”
"The Scout," about a would-be Hollywood power couple's trip to the desert is very much a Brad Sykes film. His work is always clean, slick, and polished. Here, he uses a TWILIGHT ZONE vibe to explore stereotypical Hollywood shallowness with satirical bite. Sykes' actress, a cutie named Alexis Codding, brings just the right note of pathos to a character defined by her vapidness and self-absorption to keep the character both sympathetic and undeserving of her fate.
While HI-8 does it's best to capture the feel of a bygone era of video-making, it's can't hide the fact that it's a product of today. To it's credit, the one thing these shorts get wrong are their treatment of women. Sykes' contributions are the closest any of the female characters are exploited and treated like victims. In the Hi-8 heyday, a vast majority of female characters were played by strippers hired to pop their tops and die as horribly as the filmmakers could afford to kill them. The connective tissue linking most of these shorts is the idea of female empowerment as the female characters either take charge of their situations or guarantee their revenge in the end. I don't know if this was a conscious decision on part of the producers going in, but on one hand I nostalgically miss the sleaze elements video filmmakers used to ensure distribution, but on the other I'm pleased that the SOV movement has evolved to a point where it isn't necessary.
HI-8 was released on DVD and Blu-Ray from Wild Eye Releasing