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FADE TO BLACK #5
After watching FADE TO BLACK #3 I was seriously jazzed for the next FTB screener in my stack. Perhaps I was a bit to jazzed. After the bang-up job the Random Foo boys did with #3, how could they surpass with a follow-up?By not even trying!
The shorts on FADE TO BLACK #5 pre-date Random Foo as a production company. Except for a single short, Jason Santo and Co. go back to their "vault of classics" and do a little re-mastering. The look is High-8, but the edit feels digital. You don't see the grain that comes with multiple analog generations.
Like the song says, "everything old is new again."
Theses older shorts reflect the early days of most filmmakers careers, when it's just friends goofing for the camera and having fun. You can see there was no serious effort made at professionalism. If there were, that might have spoiled their moment. It surely would have taken away the short's purity.
The first short is a throwaway gag bit, almost certainly Taratino-inspired, titled "Spontaneous Combustion." Directed by and staring Dan Corgone and CC Chapman, SC is an improvisational comedy about two different hitmen who are hired to wear bad outfits (exactly like the one's I wore in my early days of college) and snuff each other out. The film ends with the great action catch phrase, "let's get Jimmy." Jimmy being the voice at the other end of the phone who hired these two bozos to being with.
At less than 5 minutes, there is no time for character development or plot. From the looks of things, I don't think the filmmakers had any in mind anyway. The film is used to set up the action for the second short film "Kaboom," the sole new film on the tape. Joseph Vaccariello and Jason Santo write, direct, and star in a fleshed out version of "Spontaneous Combustion". Jimmy calls these guys, unbeknownst to each other, and orders them to dress in the same terrible outfits and kill the two guys from SC. The joke is that these two guys have no sense of direction and neither one can find the laundry mat where the original two guys were last seen.
A bit drawn out in the middle, and sometimes the joke regarding the bad direction where's thin, but once each character realizes what's taken place things pick up and the real laughs begin.
The final short is another "Remastered Classic", a conventional time travel, sci-fi bit written and directed by Jason Santo titled "Killing Time." Dan Corgone and Kerry O'Shea play two time-hopping assassins attempting to eliminate a threat to mankind's future. Borrowing the plot device from the first two shorts, neither assassin knows the other is on the job. The action moves at a quick clip, almost two quick to set up the punchline. Picture Timecop with a splattering of Three's Company and you've got the idea. But for what it is, it works well.
The films on FADE TO BLACK #5 are a bit rougher around the edges and lack the bite of volume 3, but I liked these more. Maybe it's nostalgia, FTB5 brought back a wave of filmmaking memories I haven't had in years. Like the time my freshman roommate Marvin Sevilla and I made our first Super 8 shorts. I couldn't stop smiling, poor Marv probably did about 30 takes of me trying to throw a piece of paper into a trashcan before he finally caught one where my lips stayed locked. Oh, there's the time I was thrown out of a Meijer's grocery store and threatened with arrest for crimes of a Super 8 nature. And the worst crime of all, that lame MTV inspired music video show Marv and I did, "201-A Oak Hall." We should have been shanked to death for that travesty against humanity.
Man, those were the days.