Short Shear Terror: It's just a Movie (2011)

It's Just a Movie (Canada, 2011)
rating: ***1/2
starring:  Paul Whittington and Jeff Carpenter

Does it really make us monsters for liking a monster? Can a single film really damage a child's mind that bad? And if it can, why the hell are you letting them watch it anyway?

An experimental art film about the perspective of horror media to the censors. Told in a gory manner, the stop-motion art-film had two key scenes that runs all through-out; a pro-censor man in his sermon about the evils of violent horror films, of how it can affect the little youngin's noggins with all that grue and gore. While the first half had this guy talk of censoring and stopping movies like Cannibal Man, The Driller Killer and Toolbox Murders, the next scene, however, goes into an artistic approach to this matter. It suddenly shows that the Pro-censor man, now holding an axe, laughing away as a VHS hopes inside a player, only to be "hacked to death" with an axe. Assuming it's ole Censorman's handiwork, the scene is just played-out bloody as sprays of bright red began to spill and splash out of the machine. The short ends with the VHS hopping out of the machine "wounded" but soon killed, and the TV smashed with a sledgehammer. A shard finally decided to talk back with a message that we all can agree with.

Simple yet stylishly bloody (or gory in a machine's point-of-view), It's Just a Movie is a horror film for horror fans; straight out of a real-life nightmare, it takes us back to the dark days of Moral Panic and the notorious Video Nasty bannings. Honestly, though, some of the movies in that list does kinda deserved to be banned for other reasons, but the short's message is clear to us. The censors had once threatened creativity, unfairly bashed these films due to their nature, single-outed as the main reason why kids went bad those times. Everybody from religious nutjobs to political pigs had easily pointed fingers to this misunderstood genre, threatening its existance, but in a way, also hyping it. Right now, we're kinda lucky that the censors had loosen up a bit today, and thanks to the help of video releases and the cult status built from all that censoring, we all can enjoy these films uncut and free from judging eyes. The film talks about this in a way we all can understand as a horror fanatic, and in a twisted sense, it terrifies us cuz we know what the images meant.

Bodycount:
1 Betamax Tape hacked in half with cleaver
1 VHS player hacked to death with axe
1 Betamax Tape smashed with sledgehammer
1 Television smashed with sledgehammer
total: 4