Another Hole in the Head Film Festival Dec. 11–27 Online
The SF Indiefest family’s annual compendium of horror, paranoia, fantasy and freakiness bills itself as the last film festival of 2020. In the dying days of the Year of the Plague, I take that as a declaration of defiance and a proclamation of persistence—confronting our fears and coming out the other side, and all that. Surely after the last four years, er, 10 months, no one craves being terrified for its own sake, do they?
I direct you to the handiwork of Bay Area filmmakers, led by Murder Bury Win, Michael Lovan’s cunning and devious yarn about the unexpected need for the inventors of a board game—whose object is to get away with murder—to, um, evade attention in the wake of a fatal incident. Who among us hasn’t imagined him or herself in a similar predicament, at least in normal times when visiting family was a holiday ritual.
Local Shorts serves up nine unsettling celluloid dream-states by talents such as Noel Rafizadeh-Kabe, Ingrid Jung, Dustin B. Pearson, Vincent Cortez and Chad Saxelid, capped by D’arcy Leland’s 55-minute chiller Andrea’s Fault. Santa’s going to need something stronger than cookies and milk this year, and he’s not alone.
