Once again Derby’s Paracinema hosted a fantastic range of genre features and short films.
Here are our verdicts on the Burnt Offerings shorts segment –
Sair Ane
We meet an isolated sick man and instantly think this is gonna be a hard-hitting pandemic themed film.
Think again; Sair Ane from Ian Gordon is much more complex.
At times gruesome, but this is complex stuff as he realises he has found a way to regenerate body parts which becomes a strange obsession.
There is a wink a nod to Evil Dead, as long as the most extreme body horror. The practical effects are incredible and even more astounding given they were all filmed during the height of lockdown with a limited crew, including the director’s child.
Sair Ane is ambitious and truly superb.
Fishwife
When a lonely woman in a rural fishing town gets a surprise visitor in the dead of night, she gets more than she bargained for.
Of course, this man has bad intentions but what comes next is certainly surprising.
Fishwife, looks incredible and features a great central performance with Lovecraftian vibes.
A Sober Dance
I really didn’t know what to make of A Sober Dance.
It felt like a bunch of random scenes thrown together with no real structure in between.
In does look great but I wasn’t fully sure if it was a period piece of a modern post-apocalyptic setting.
A muddled effort.
O
We meet a young woman who finds a hole in a wall that she can’t stop grinning at, in the bizarre and avant-garde O.
With obvious David Lynch vibes, this is pure experimental cinema which will work for some and not for others.
O, is ambitious with a fairly abstract theme that I couldn’t fully wrap my head around.
Bloody Flicks 