Starring: Vincent Bingham, Natasha Smith, Ashley Rose-Withers, Nathan Day, Scott Sullivan, David Haney

Written & Directed By: Stephen Zimmer, Matthew Perry

 The Indie Movie Masters collection will include a series of short films brought together, covering several genres of film. The first volume is entitled the “Festival of Horrors Double Feature”. It includes two short horror thrillers, “The Sirens” and “Murderer”. Both of these films follows the concept of killing being used as a form of justice, being a punishment for those who smugly get away with their immoral behavior.

The Sirens is the better of the two films. It shows us a group of greedy, cheating business executives. We see how they are able to get joy out of depriving others of success and soaking up all of the glory for themselves. One cop in particular witnesses this too many times. Since they haven’t done anything illegal there doesn’t seem to be much she can do about this, even when they attack her friend. This doesn’t phase them at all as they make sure to take off their wedding rings, leave their wives at home, and get together for a guys night with the erotic accompaniment of the women of Persephone’s Escort Service. A few other women show up and take one of the men away, making him agree that they will have some fun together tonight if the women get total control. The cop also runs in to one of their friends and agrees not to arrest him if he would rather bring it to the bedroom. He agrees and his friend is already at the house, clearly having quite a good time. However, just minutes later he witnesses what his fate will lead to by the end of the night. These girls’ idea of fun may not coincide with theirs.

The first portion of The Sirens isn’t quite as exciting as the last, but it does show us some of the wrong doing of these executives and those who their actions are effecting. It adds a little more meaning to the film in that, it isn’t just a cool vampire short, but vampires fighting against and thus getting pleasure out of maintaining a social order of their own. Usually in vampire films we get characters who get pleasure on pinning the innocent as their targets and occasionally vampires cases like Twilight or The Vampire Diaries where they fight their nature to keep some sense of morality. It’s interesting how the vampires in The Sirens use their essential need to feed off of humans as a way to punish the bad ones. They never harm anyone who doesn’t fall in to this category either. The vampires seductively lure them in with trickery and their sexuality just to feast off of their flesh. This wouldn’t even work in the first place if these men would have denied them and went home to their wives. This theory is even tested on an ex-military man who after serving his country is having trouble finding any justice around him as he suffers to get by. He is in a vulnerable state when one of the vampires comes on to him, but he remains loyal to his girlfriend. If the other men would have been a bit more faithful, perhaps the vampires wouldn’t have attacked them. In this case, cheating is punishable by blood feasting. The ending is by far the most fun part of the film. It isn’t terribly graphic, but there is a good amount of blood and especially the image of the vampires fangs after they have devoured blood is really realistic. The all around look of the vampires, even the effect of their eyes that almost seem hollow makes them seem all the more un-human and creepy.

The second film, Murderer, is about a serial killer who has been arrested for the murders of 3 out of the 11 people he actually killed. Murder has driven him for so many years and now he is in a jail cell, restraining him from what he has become so accustomed to. His life is essentially over and there is only one person who he has the capabilities to murder now: himself. He decides to commit suicide and attempts it in various ways such as hanging himself with a sheet and cutting himself with a razor. However, this never seems to work. He actually died and somehow he came back to life. There is always a guard and a prisoner who witness what happens to him. He can never make out the guard’s face, but there is always a distinctive tattoo of the prisoner. The prisoner who witnesses this always ends up dead by the next day and even when our protagonist is gushing blood, supernatural forces seem to be instantly healing him. Death may not be a way out for him.

There were certain elements of Murderer that were very interesting. It fits with the themes of The Sirens in that he is the anti-hero character, inflicting evil on others who have done wrong. This man is a killer and is not ashamed of what he has done. Still, he has only killed people who have done something bad, such as a rapist who he killed to save another life. The idea of a murderer killing himself as the last and potentially most important kill he made was interesting since it wasn’t as if he was ashamed of himself or trying to escape anything. He is just a killer and even if he is the last person left he can kill, he has to act on that intuition. It is only when he is not able to kill himself and doesn’t understand the forces that seem to be working against him that he begins to feel the insanity of being contained in that cell to be building up.

I always appreciate it when horror films help us get in to the mind of the killer as in this case. The killer narrates, but rather than telling us a story, we are really just brought inside his mind and hear what his every thought is. We do get somewhat of an understanding of him, but the narrating gets redundant fast. It gets trapped, which does work in response to the entrapment of the main character being confined to his jail cell, but there isn’t really anywhere for it to go. The narration makes the piece drag when it is already pretty short. In the beginning he does describe his first kill and the typical men he would go after. Perhaps going to a flashback to these moments would both give us a wider understanding of him and would offer a break from the repetitiveness that we are given. Even more interactions with other prisoners could have added something here. Also, the directiont he supernatural stuff goes loses the initial story a bit. The first portion of the segment is definitely the best, taking us in to the mind of a serial killer that is determined to get his last kill while the last part drags, has long pauses where nothing is going on, and the overall quality and concept fall apart somewhat.