Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on August 9, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
I suppose I should be starting this review by lauding Synapse Films and the Fantasia festival’s Mitch Davis for providing this showcase for that most commercially neglected of forms, the short genre film, so many worthy examples of which never receive the exposure they deserve. But Davis himself makes a strong enough case for their worth in his liner notes, and in a video message on the disc (where, with his usual gift for visceral metaphor, he describes making such minimovies as often being “a pregnancy process with an especially unhappy ending”). And besides, I simply can’t go past this first paragraph without addressing the audio commentary on Tea Break, one of the funniest and certainly most unique such tracks I’ve heard in my history of watching and reviewing DVDs. Director Sam Walker and writer Timothy Reeves’ approach to the discussion of their grisly, jet-black comedy is inspired, flat-out hilarious as well as revealing and probably couldn’t have been done with a feature film, since the duo…er…nope, I’m not gonna spoil it. If you haven’t read about it elsewhere, you really need to experience it without foreknowledge for the full, surprising effect.
There—that’s one more reason to pick up Small Gauge Trauma, which spans the globe and a decade of the Fantasia fest to present a baker’s dozen of films representing a cross-section of languages, stylistic approaches and even genres. Not everything here qualifies as horror; Diego Abad’s Ruta Destroy! is a youths-and-drugs musical, Tenkwaku Naniwa’s Miss Greeny is a simple, 30-second visual joke and Tomoya Sato’s L’Ilya is a subdued mood piece addressing the distressing subject of suicide. Even the three animated pieces vary wildly in tone and technique: Benoit Boucher’s Flat ’N’ Fluffy is a hysterically deranged piece of homegrown cel work, Salvador Sanz’s Gorgonas comes off like a lost segment from Heavy Metal shot through with pop-culture satire and Robert Morgan’s multi-award-winning The Separation makes truly eerie use of stop-motion. All of the works here, however, are definitely—and defiantly—off-Hollywood, many indulging in both themes and explicitness that mainstream features rarely if ever touch.
Needless to say, each viewer will have his or her own favorites depending on their particular taste and temperament. Some might prefer the surreal/expressionistic approaches of Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Chambre Jaune (a giallo homage told partially through still frames) and Guillaume Fortin’s Infini (a variation on the idea of one’s life flashing before one’s eyes at the moment of death). Personally, I especially dug the ferociously straightforward and grisly occult dynamics of Brazilian filmmaker Dennison Ramalho’s Love from Mother Only (pictured above), one of several works here hailing from Spanish-speaking countries. It’s hard to say whether it’s something in these particular cultures that spawns such a wide and impressive range of twisted shorts, but the results certainly warrant inclusion here; others include the discomfiting Abuelitos by Paco Plaza (whose subsequent features have yet to duplicate its power) and Miguel Ángel Vivas’ I’ll See You in My Dreams, an energetic homage to Eurozombie/splatter cinema complete with characters named “Dario” and “Lucio.”
The Small Gauge Trauma ensemble sports a wide range of visual presentations as well, from the garish primary colors of Chambre to the stark black-and-white of Phillip John’s Sister Lulu, a fun homage to both Edgar Allan Poe and nasty-nun exploitation. The assorted aspect ratios and color schemes are all handled very well in Synapse’s presentations, and the Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo sound does well by all the shorts’ varying aural approaches, from the quietly suggestive to the loud and aggressive. All the movies are presented in their original languages, with English subtitles where required; the latter provided by Synapse are removable and flawless, while the subs ingrained in a couple of the films are not and sport quite a few typos.
The Tea Breakers aren’t the only ones to take an offbeat approach to their commentary; Flat ’N’ Fluffy’s is delivered by a “robot” whose monologue is as over-the-top in its raunch as the movie is in its bloody splatstick. Almost as profane is the enthusiastic talk by Ramalho and FX creator Andre Kapel on Love, which packs plenty of entertaining revelations into 21 minutes (the script was co-written by a macumba priest Ramalho met in prison, and the lead is a former hardcore porn actress!). The rest of the commentaries are more sedate, but all are worth a listen, and each is as distinctive as the film it accompanies. There’s also a brief but informative short on the making of Gorgonas, a deleted scene from Separation (also with commentary), an I’ll See You music video in which zombies attack the band, biographies of all the filmmakers (Naniwa’s is especially amusing), assorted Fantasia promos and even a video introduction by Coffin Joe, who welcomes you to the collection with typical flamboyance.
If you’ve never been to Fantasia (seriously, what are you waiting for?) or haven’t been able to sample the wild, weird world of short horror filmmaking, Small Gauge Trauma couldn’t be a better place to start. If you have attended Fantasia or other fests, this is an excellent way to rediscover the thrill of discovery one can feel seeing movies like these for the first time—and may have you making mental wish lists for what one hopes will be many more volumes. Memo to the Synapse and Fantasia guys: Just off the top of my head, how about Dalibor Backovic’s Entombed, Graham Rose’s Mrs. Meitlemeihr, Greg Houston’s Phil Karew and Dean Ronalds’ The Netherbeast of Berm-Tech Industries, Inc. for the next collection?
