Scary Little Fuckers (Short)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one- a film starts with a father going into a store run by foreigners (I think they are). He’s looking for a present for his teenage son just before Christmas. He sees an odd little creature in the corner, and he’s immediately excited. The owner says no, but will finally relent, but he has one rule. If you’re thoughts don’t immediately head in the direction of Joe Dante’s “Gremlins” in reading that, I would be very surprised, but it’s actually the setup for Nathan Suher’s short film, “Scary Little Fuckers” (subtitled, “A Christmas Movie”), and the comparisons will not stop there for this film with the Dante classic. The big difference, as should be obvious by the title, is that this is in no way a family-acceptable Christmas horror story, but vulgar and going beyond anything resembling good taste even before the Fookahs, the creatures of our story, run amuck. That doesn’t make the similarities within writer Lenny Schwartz’s script any less obvious, or his and Suher’s attempts to push this material further than “Gremlins” did any less labored. Unlike the characters in Joe Dante’s film, the characters in “Scary Little Fuckers” don’t resemble actual people but are broad, stupid caricatures: the father, Saul (Rich Tretheway), who is a bit of a loser, and trying to make things better for his son Kyle (Josh Fontaine) this Christmas after his mother killed herself. Things liven up when the “girl next door,” Peggy (Anna Rizzo), comes over and really gets things going by bribing Kyle into breaking the one rule; Rizzo is very funny, but still playing a caricature rather than a human being. The Fookahs, which look like Furbees on meth, and the loopy score by Timothy Fife are the big highlights of the film, and bring out a level of fun absurdity that elevates the film beyond being an attempt to mirror a beloved classic, and push it further, but they still can’t help the film from feeling like a painfully contrived watch. Bonus points, though, for the song during the end credits, though; that was arguably the most enjoyable part of the movie.
