By Keri O’Shea
Well, I could go in for a big mea culpa about the sad lack of Horror in Short features here at Brutal as Hell lately, but I think it’d be best all round if I just got on with it, yes? Happily, today you can take a look at two very stylistically different but both engaging short films by director Peter Dukes. So far sticking to the short movie format, I understand that Dukes is currently working on his first feature-length film, also going by the same title – though not an extension of the same plot – as our first short, The Beast.
I have to say, I was genuinely very pleasantly surprised here; The Beast knows it doesn’t have the time or the space to reinvent the werewolf genre, but it is a very worthy addition to this genre nonetheless. It obviously knows where it fits in, too, with its very clear nods to the werewolf folklore created by Universal, and a set of opening credits which for all the world would fit well at the beginning of a Universal feature (and the same could be said for the film’s score, too, which works brilliantly here). The plot is straightforward enough: two men, Desmond (Peter Le Bas) and Michael (genre film regular Bill Oberst Jr) discuss the fate of Michael’s teenage son, Jacob (Alexander Le Bas), whom we understand very early on has been afflicted with lycanthropy. Initially, and in fear of the full moon, they tie the boy up but, well, a father’s preferential treatment makes Michael take pity on the boy, untying him so that he can answer a more mundane call of nature. Of course, this decision brings the situation to a close…
The film works brilliantly as a short, and again as a short on the topic of werewolves, because it wisely avoids two things. Firstly, it doesn’t feel the need to cram a feature’s worth of back-story into its twelve minutes, instead allowing the emotions and the precise situation in which these people find themselves to speak for itself. Secondly – with a few seconds’ exception which nearly derails things, but thankfully does not – it knows that werewolf creature effects are the easiest to get wrong so it dispenses with them. The budget has been far better-spent on the other elements: developing the theme of family and friendships, ensuring solid performances, finding a great location and shooting a film which looks both lavish, but subtle, with a pleasing palate and a real eye for scene-setting. Hell, it even has a punchline, albeit an equally subtle one. The Beast is a very strong short film.
Little Reaper, made earlier this year, is a very different entity, although it too teases out some ideas about family relationships in a strange, horror-styled setting. This time we get this via the medium of horror-comedy, and a style of comedy which I’d best describe as ‘quirky’.
Our premise here is that the Grim Reaper has a teenage daughter; apart from the skull face, she’s your standard stereotypical teenage girl, glued to her phone and apparently pathologically unable to do what she is asked to do. Hence, she is grounded, and the only way her dear old dad will un-ground her is if she adds a day of doing his job to her chores list.
Again, Dukes shows that he knows his genre by adding in a few horror references to the script here. There are also plenty of ideas at play, although perhaps there are rather more threads here than there need to be (I felt that the finale didn’t quite hang together, for instance). As a skit, it is however watchable and diverting, although because it lacks the economy of The Beast, accepting that these are different types of film, it felt less accomplished to me. Still, Buffy did pretty well by combining horror, folklore and high school, so there’s no reason that fans of that style wouldn’t like this one too.
Peter Dukes is evidently a hard-working filmmaker and he has a whole host of short movies in his filmography: if you have enjoyed what you’ve seen, then you could stop by his website and take a look at some of his other projects.