By all rights, Killer Me shouldn't work as (modestly) well as it does: its underwritten screenplay delivers inexplicable characters expected to mouth awkward, unsayable dialogue; it's not very well researched, attributing its serial killer's behaviour to an unlikely pathology that strains credulity; and it directs its generally fine actors to be as slow and unresponsive as possible, making things move at an unnecessarily glacial pace. But while I'd never classify it as a masterpiece, I find it hard to dismiss Killer Me out of hand--its antiseptic stillness is too pervasive to be an accident and too unusual to make it seem entirely negligible. Should director Zachary Hansen spend a little more time at the library and the typewriter, you might see him really cook someday.

The film deals largely with Joseph (George Foster), a serial killer who studies criminology by day in order to understand his own shattered psyche. By night he roams the parkland in search of victims to slash with his straight razor, activated by scenes of abuse that hark back to a disturbed family life--but there's no way for a needy girl like Anna (Christina Kew) to know that. Perhaps sensing another soul as lonely as herself, she glumly pesters him for a date and tries her damnedest to win him over. But Joseph has too many secrets and murders to bear and pushes her away, unaware that she's much more persistent than he bargained for.

This concept could have been a real winner ("serial killer stalked by girlfriend" doesn't make the rounds very often), and a cunning writer might have found some subtextual interest latent within. But there is the whiff of amateurism to Hansen's script, which is all surfaces and simple explanations. For one thing, Joseph has no real dimension to his personality beyond being a serial killer and having a four-year-old goldfish with no name. (Needless to say, the goldfish's death triggers nasty thoughts and depression that befits its metaphorical function.) The dialogue is also a problem, as it's written very awkwardly--it suggests someone trying to make common phrases more "original" by rephrasing them with random words. And Joseph's motive for murder is too much a Freud 101 scenario, explaining away both the precise portraits of Clean, Shaven and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (each cited on the DVD case) or a satisfying caricature like Hannibal Lecter.

And yet, there's something compelling about Killer Me's refusal to go for the jugular in its quick study of its protagonist. Not so fascinated by the murders themselves, it's more about the lead-time between them as Joseph struggles with his conscience and psyche--and the film backs him up with a relentless observing camera (courtesy DP Neal Fredericks, of Blair Witch fame) that captures him sitting around doing nothing while his brain charges away. It's this commitment to quiet desperation that makes the film strangely hypnotic, filling the empty space with dread at both his suffering and his imminent capacity to explode in violence. While Hansen--whose direction of actors needs to be speedier so as not to lull us into a stupor--sometimes takes this too far, there's no denying an uncommon sensibility at work here that someone would do well to nurture. Killer Me may not be the success its makers would like us to think it is, but it shows a nascent talent that might one day emerge from its cocoon to show us some beautiful colours.-Travis Hoover

The Debut is "independent" in size and advertising budget only--in every other respect, it has its sights set on competing with the Hollywood that has shut out most ethnicities beyond WASPs and African-Americans. But while it tries valiantly to right the wrong that keeps Filipino-Americans from seeing themselves splashed gloriously across the screen, its aesthetic and dramatic considerations are bland and unimaginative in a way that would make any Hollywood executive proud. Shot through with John Hughes' teenage longing but denuded of the master's irony or regret, The Debut barely manages the dreaded "Afterschool Special" tag in its aw-shucks delineation of its protagonist's trials. And though it desperately aspires to be a "real movie," it's unaware of the fact that such "realness" is in fact a cruel stranglehold--one from which only "illegitimate" directors can save us.

The film deals with Ben Mercado (Dante Basco), a Filipino-American teenager chomping at the bit of his ethnicity. Not only does his blue-collar father want him to go to medical school and drop his dream of comic-book greatness, but everywhere around him he sees his heritage as a liability--and he yearns for acceptance from his white peers. He even tries to blow off his sister's traditional 18^th-birthday coming-out ceremony (the "debut" of the title) in order to hang out with his white friends. But his shame is due for a shaking up: soon he will find himself forced to see his apparently autocratic father's point of view, pelted with racial epithets by a drunken teenager, and intrigued by a self-respecting Filipino girl who helps him see his culture as a plus--all on the fringes of his sister's debut, which serves as an excellent focal point for the events of the film.

Unfortunately, it's not enough of one to make The Debut seem focused. Part of the film's downfall is that it tries to shoehorn a wealth of data into the tired format of a coming-of-age drama, treating us to nuggets of information that fly off into space. We duly note the woman who is too thrilled to have a white husband, and said husband being a pompous, patronizing ass; the fresh-off-the-boat rubbing shoulders with the never-been-on-one and causing fear and loathing; the patriarchal traditions clashing with the American way of "freedom"; and even a potted history of America's sorry influence over Filipino history. But each of these elements--in and of themselves, ripe for movies of their own--whips past us as we are compelled by the clanking vehicle of a standard Hollywood narrative that truncates anything "extraneous" on the way to its crashing conclusion. Coupled with a sure eye for the banal composition, the film is a professional mess without an aesthetic or structural idea of its own.

On the face of it, there's nothing wrong with director Gene Cajayon's pursuit. It should, after all, be everybody's birthright to see him or herself affirmed at ten times life size in a darkened, air-conditioned space. But the best Hollywood movies are more than their formats--they build on that structure with style and cunning and the occasional good observation. The Debut does the opposite: it takes a milieu seldom filmed and rich in complexity and imprisons it in the dark confines of the format, taking with it some suggestive subplots and unexamined premises. Cajayon may think that he's glorifying the milieu by doing so, but in failing to give this culture a shape of its own, he winds up doing the opposite.-Travis Hoover

The interesting thing about short films is that because of their commensurately minimal costs and time commitment they can, in essence, afford to push the envelope in regards to material free of investor interests. Thus the sad thing about short films is that they've become, in the last few years, a trailer reel for aspiring directors, leaving those envelopes unpushed. If anything, then, the shorts collected on People's Broken Noses Compliment [sic] Their Broken Faces brace with their dedication to not being commercial in the slightest (often, they're not even watchable), displaying a kind of allegiance to guerrilla filmmaking that is at heart what the game's all about. That's the theory, anyway, but like a lot of avant garde cinema, what's noble in theory is often excruciating and self-indulgent in practice, and while these filmmakers get credit for bravery, there's a thin line between courage and foolhardiness. I fear that I can't in good conscience say that any of these short films shows much promise. I make the statement not for the roughness of the projects, but for what seems like a cavalier attitude in their creation that is at once exclusionary-verging-on-arrogant and sloppy-verging-on-reckless. Dada as a movement in art finds its logical end in self-immolation, after all.-Walter Chaw

The story of a serial defecator terrorizing a small group of people in an unnamed Canadian burg, The Shitter looks terrible, sounds terrible, is terrible. The entire contents of a community theatre seem to have been emptied into a drunken idea of humour made manifest in an obnoxious short that fails to demonstrate the basics of filmcraft while making the unfortunate decision to end with footage of the titular miscreant in action. Enough.-WC

Handheld in the worst possible sense of the word, Daubit Crigh answers the question of what those two weirdos in trenchcoats at the lunch counter are talking about. They're aliens or something, talking about taxation scams and buying weapons. Yep.-WC

An undergraduate animation project (jagged mountain peaks with a little man .gif running through them) graduates into some sort of live-action torture chamber or something with guys attached, we surmise, to a virtual reality machine (maybe they're the little man .gifs) and being observed by a retinue of white-clad ciphers. Again less a fully developed piece than a few ideas for images carried out to the limits of what a zero-budget can afford, it's not loaded enough to be art, nor linear enough to be narrative. What it is is a mess.-WC

A film with pace and some heat, Mr. Blast takes a walk with a Canuck Mr. Bean who looks a lot like Jingle Dell from Wild at Heart. There seem to be messages embedded in here about race, homelessness, and commerce, which at least provides for some extratextual discussion, and while the film goes on at least half-and-again too long, it maintains a level of misanthropic energy and some interest in the resolution.-WC

Rendered in an enhanced photo negative that looks sort of cool for a minute or two, this journey of a mysterious stranger, ending in the bedroom of an attractive naked woman, is undeniably haunting. Without a real point of reference, however, haunting has to be seen as an implied reaction and not one necessarily earned by any sort of cohesive vision, turning the whole exercise into decorative, evasive soft-porn. I do like the idea, however, of a sort of examination of the rape fantasy as a usurpation of the aggressor's power.-WC

An epilepsy-inspiring bout of misogyny concerning the torture and hallucinations of a chair-bound woman, at the least it's only graphic in its implication and doesn't last very long besides.-WC