Carnage for Christmas and From My Cold Dead Hands are screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.
Carnage for Christmas
Alice Maio Mackay is a fascinating case. A super-low-budget filmmaker, Mackay has made, by my count, five feature films, among other projects. Given that she’s only 19 years old, that’s quite a prolific start to a career. Carnage for Christmas is the first I’ve seen from Mackay, and I must say, the style takes some adjusting to. The editing, provided by filmmaker Vera Drew, is vibrant and disorienting. Flashes of gruesome violence are obfuscated by clever cuts, elevating the B-movie slasher element of this premise.
My issue with the film is not visual (although there are some lighting choices that I wasn’t a fan of). It is with the story. Everything in the script is just slightly overwritten. Characters state their beliefs and intimate feelings bluntly, leaving little genuine tension between people who are meant to be on edge and confrontational (which is the case for most characters). The plot is weaved together by convoluted bits of information about characters we know little about, leaving the mystery of the murder mystery more cumbersome than exciting.
That said, the moments that set aside the mystery in favor of horror movie antics are skillful, especially for a film of this budget. The would-be slasher set pieces are brief and bloody. More traditional horror set pieces would likely have expanded this film to a more traditional runtime. But in this case, I prefer the speed of it all. The lack of buildup almost makes the kills feel nastier than they otherwise would.
As many who have reviewed her work have already said, Mackay shows a great deal of promise. I would be interested in seeing her be able to take some of these unconventional choices and employ them on a slightly higher-budgeted production.
Carnage For Christmas: C+
From My Cold Dead Hands
Javier Horcajada’s From My Cold Dead Hands is a found footage compilation film that provides its audience with roughly an hour of YouTube content related to firearms. It takes a page out of the book of the “Everything is Terrible!” collective, in that it edits clips together mainly for the sake of humor.
Some will consider this an appeal for gun reform in the United States, as a film that condemns using deafening silence. The film does provide the space for these online content creators to hang themselves with cognitive dissonance and/or Schadenfreude. And yet, the mashup’s lack of internal structure provides little direction for coherent messaging.
Not to mention that some of these content creators are seriously entertaining, such that it seems wrong-headed to package them together as something to be laughed at simply for the fact that these people like owning guns. It’s one thing to see a highly inebriated man attempting to load and shoot a hunting rifle and think, this is a bad look. It’s another to see someone choreograph a clever parody of “Cups” using a pistol and believe that the film is attempting a purely pro-gun reform message.
The downside of this lack of coherence is that it begs the question: why are these clips being lumped together in this particular way? The art of a compilation film is in the edit, in the creation of new meaning through juxtaposition. With From My Cold Dead Hands, I struggled throughout to identify meaningful juxtaposition. In at least one case, given how little editing was done to the source video, I couldn’t even be certain that the film would pass the muster of a Fair Use test, let alone that it provides new and interesting context for the content therein. (It should be noted, Fair Use is a legal question that is judged on a case-by-case basis, so it is not my place to say whether or not there is any violation here. But there was a segment that made me raise an eyebrow when it comes to the issue of copying the “heart” of a work).
If you want to watch “GunTube” videos, you don’t need a filmmaker to curate the experience for you. The film can really only present as a Rorschach test: if you don’t like guns, then you’ll find more reason to continue not liking them. If you enjoy shooting rifles to the melody of your favorite song, well, apparently there’s an entire niche subgenre of GunTube videos for you. In either case, From My Cold Dead Hands is adding fleetingly little to the conversation.
From My Cold Dead Hands: D+
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)
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