Change Your Image
llewellr
Reviews
In the Refrigerator: Spirit of a Haunted Dancer (2000)
Rubbish!
This film was shown at the York international film festival in 2002 and I've been purposely avoiding it whenever it's cropped up at various other events ever since.
The whole thing is nothing more than a self indulgent wallow by someone with more money than talent. For reasons that are hard to fathom Leslie Anne Coles has taken it upon herself to play all characters in this film from the middle aged "haunted dancer" to the 200 years dead Irish great grandmother who comes back to watch her dance away the grief of losing her only daughter.
Leslie Anne Coles' attempts to make her self look like a long deceased Irish woman through smearing herself with white makeup and a dough like gluey substance drew nearly as many laughs from the audience as her mock Irish accent and the scenes of the haunted dancer stuffing her face with piles of food from the refrigerator (which we are invited to believe is her way of coming to terms with her loss) told us nothing meaningful about grief or the trauma of loosing a child.
An added extra character in the film is the dancers clinically insane mother (also played by Lesley Anne Coles) who we see repeatedly in her mental institution and then undergoing Electro-Convulsive Therapy but with no further explanation. I can only imagine that she must have been driven to madness by the god-awful script that her other self prepared for her. It certainly came close to having that effect on me.
This film really is, in every way, a turkey.
Stiff (2002)
Not a wasted second
I first saw Stiff in 2002 when it was selected as one of the front runners from the Edinburgh international film festival and then came across it several years later when it appeared as part of a compilation of short films being given away with a German film magazine. It's now one of my favourite short films of all time.
The four minute piece explores an intense (and wordless) meeting between a man and a boy outside an abandoned tunnel. From the opening the film draws in the viewer playing with our expectations around their relationship before leading us into an ingenious and gut wrenching final twist.
Helped along by a superbly crafted soundtrack this is one of the cleverest pieces of short film making your ever likely to see. Catch it wherever you can!