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Ray Gun Fun (1998) More at IMDbPro »

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Visually interesting but worthless story, 18 April 2004
Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK

Stuck in a traffic jam, a young boy fidgets restlessly beside his mother, pulling faces and rocking back and forward. To placate him, his mother allows him to open up a carefully wrapped present in the back seat - a plastic toy ray gun. When they arrive home, he continues to play with his new ray gun - to the detriment of some of the other things in his room.

As a fan of all things short I was happy to give this film ten minutes of my time - if it is great then fantastic, if it is rubbish then I have only wasted ten minutes so no great loss! The film opens in a sort of strange 1950's world that has been crossed with toned-down characters from Dr Seuss, with a visual style that is quite otherworldly. Visually the film is never really dull - it is full of bright colours and held my interest from the very start until the strange ending.

The problem with the short is that there is almost no substance to go along with this style. Things happen for sure but it is difficult to really follow what is going on or, more importantly, to make sense of understand them to the point where you are intellectually involved in the film. The acting doesn't really help as it isn't great. The boy and the mother both look really fitting but neither has much to work with. The little boy is too much of a `doer' rather than an `actor', it seems an unfair criticism but there are times where you can almost hear the director saying `ok, sit up now, wide eyes, that's it, now be excited and run to the door' - the boy just does these actions and that's a wrap. The mother only has a few seconds onscreen but the presence of her hands washing dishes was another element I didn't see the point of.

With it's fun title and strange look, I wanted this film to be enjoyable and fun. Sadly it may look interesting but the total lack of engaging substance was a problem for me - even if it had been off the wall I could still have gotten into it if I could even have followed what was going on but this doesn't really have a story of even the most basic definition and the visuals are not clever or inventive enough to fill the void left by that. Maybe worth a look once for the visual design side of it but certainly no more than that.

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