CAVE PEOPLE

Directed and Written by James Mirarchi
Edited and Photographyed by Chris Burns

Josh - Matthew Gardner
Tammy - Kerry Gudjohnsen
Gina - Caridad Francisca

James Mirarchi has improved greatly since his previous short work, BEER AND ART. Everything about CAVE PEOPLE is a step up in the right direction. It's better written, better acted, better shot, and better constructed. And to his credit, it's even more twisted and demented.

Josh and Tammy are siblings with a warped sense of family values. They put on an air of dysfunction, but maintain tender moments in private. They both have their hang-ups. He's a closeted homosexual who loves to time his sister's lovers from the moment of penetration to the point of ejaculation (the record is 18 seconds). She's a nympho who loves her brother to watch and time her lovers. Her hardest chore is finding a man who can keep up.

Neither can understand the other's fixations, but like loving siblings they accept each for those fixation, but at the end of the day it also frustrates each that the other can't understand where those fixations are coming from. Tammy suffers from a mother-whore complex that stems from the death of her mother and the responsibility of taking care of Josh. Josh believes his sister won't accept his desire for male genitalia.

There lives are thrown into flux when each find someone who fully sympathizes with each. Josh takes a wiccan fag-hag in Gina all the while falling for Tammy's new boyfriend who chastises her for the public abuse Tammy puts upon her brother. Josh gains acceptance and thus empowerment; Tammy learns submission and thus jealousy.

Gina, the minx that she is, desides Josh needs that final push and casts a love spell for Josh in hopes of bestowing upon him Tammy's lover.

The end scene of psychedelic oral gratification is as disturbing for the audience as it is for Tammy. I don't mean to give anything away, which to me is a cardinal sin, but I have to share this story that ties directly into the end of CAVE PEOPLE. To escape family on Thanksgiving I thought I could hide out in the den and get some screening done. My father, a manly man who believes only in "tab-a slot-b" heterosexuality walked in at exactly the same moment Tammy got her comeuppance. As Tammy looked on in horror, I too watched in horror as my father stood agape shocked at Tammy and her orally enraptured brother. Before I knew it, pumpkin pie was hitting the floor.

In what I can only believe was a strange attempt of ethnic cleansing, my father made me watch football with the family the rest of the day.

Not that I am, but if I were gay it's good to know that my family wouldn't have exactly the same meltdown as Tammy. The sight of which is as equally disturbing as Josh's deification.

The rise and fall structure of the story is like that of THE GODFATHER films. One family member is on the way up in life, the other on the way down. Unlike in Coppala's masterpiece, Mirarchi places the two in direct competition providing for a more external conflict than what's found in THE GODFATHER. The result is a like a bizarro sexual Olympics where each participant struggles for the gold medal in Familial Supremacy.

CAVE PEOPLE is the kind of short that would fit in my favorite film festival, MicroCinefest. Hopefully, Mirarchi enters it next year. I'd love to see the audience's reaction. I wonder if they'll be picking their jaws off the floor like my father.