Underground Short Double Feature: Video Geisteskrank & My Monster (2008-2009 Directed by Ronny Carlsson)

Ronny Carlsson, head reviewer of the horror site FilmBizarro.com has made his short films Video Geisteskrank and My Monster available for download online and is working on a short run of DVD-R screeners and a limited VHS release of VG. Also set to be included as a bonus feature on the upcoming August Underground box set from Toe Tag Pictures, VG is a highly experimental and surreal short and nice fan tribute to Toe Tag’s AU films.

Shot in black and white and a silent film with a film noir-look, VG explores what happens when a viewer who, after watching the August Underground films, takes it upon himself to act out the vicious, brutal acts he witnessed in the movies. He makes a to-do list, which includes killing a hitchhiker (CHECK), puking on two innocent girls (CHECK), and torturing a young girl (CHECK). The killer goes into a church at one point and meets up with a fiendish looking character named “Maggot” (a tribute to Michael Todd Schneider’s character Maggot in August Underground’s Mordum). A young girl looking for donations for the Breast Cancer Foundation enters the killer’s home and ends up being tortured and mangled in a horrific way leading to her untimely demise. The killer frequently wears a pig mask. In one brutal scene after the next, the girl has her fingernails gruesomely removed with a pair of pliers and her tongue is cut out with scissors and she’s soon beaten over the head with a hammer. All the while, we are shown much creative imagery with dazzling camera effects, bizarre sounds, and intense music.

My Monster, the follow-up to VG, brings back the pig-masked killer and this time we are given narration by the killer with subtitles and a slowed-down voice as he talks about how “she’s everywhere” and won’t go away. She being a girl of whom he killed but can’t get out of his head. Monster contains the same creative style of VG but has an even more experimental feel to it with better industrial-sounding music and sound effects and some creative visuals which altogether give it the feel of a David Lynch film (Eraserhead comes to mind), an art house-style underground short (including but not limited to certain elements found in Nico B. and Rozz Williams’ Pig), and a Nine Inch Nails music video. Those with a taste for the bizarre and subversive will find much to like in My Monster.

VG and Monster are both excellent underground shorts. Ronny Carlsson (who currently resides in Sweden) did a fine job with the limited resources he had and even got fellow online horror reviewer Tim Wambolt (of runningwithscissors.com) and Michael Todd Schneider of Maggot Films to help out the second time around with Monster. Both films are gory, brutal, weird, nightmarish, disturbing, intense, and beautiful in their short running times (VG running 20 minutes and Monster running 30 minutes). If somebody could provide Ronny with a little extra money, it will be interesting to see what else he’s capable of doing.