Shattered (2025)

 Somewhat unsurprisingly, a ton of people have chosen to name their movies Shattered over the years. This one's a no-frills collection of horror-adjacent shorts from young British filmmakers.

 And when I say no-frills, I really mean it; the shorts (some of which made the festival rounds, and at least one of which were funded via Kickstarter) are presented with their own credits, production company logos, and a montage of mismatched credits at the end. No framing story, but that's probably for the best. Also, I don't think anyone here is known for anything else as of yet. Although I did do a double take when the name of Chris Barnes popped up as a writer, this one doesn't seem to be the... 'vocalist' of Cannibal Corpse. Nothing here is edge-lordy enough to sound like him.

 The first minute of the movie is its best - it acts as a sort of standalone prologue to John Ferrer's 1-Star Review, and shows several people getting killed in ways that ironically reflect the scathing reviews they left of one eating establishment. It's clever, funny, and well-made.
 Those qualities extend, somewhat diluted, to the rest of the short, which sees the murderous chef face off against one of his critics. It's a fun, extremely slight restaurant-set slasher tale; And, to be brutally honest, the best this anthology has to offer - That's it, you can safely stop the movie here. 

 What, still here? Well, don't say I didn't warn you. Burn, from Judson Vaughan, comes next, and it's nowhere near as fun: It's the overlong, somewhat muddled and honestly not very interesting story of the surviving family members of an impressively-eyelashed serial killer, plus the most inept police investigation ever. A huge amount of polish makes it go down easy, but it's stilted, takes itself overtly seriously, and there's just not enough there to sustain its fifteen minutes.

 The Verge seems to be a bid from a production company to produce their own content, funded through Kickstarter in a campaign that just barely squeaked by its £10k goal. It's 2086, the world is a climate-ravaged hellhole, and to get off-world three woman must compete against each other to get to the top of a building. This involves fighting, running around, and a contrived heart-to-heart... but mostly it's fighting. You know, instead of genetic tests or what-have you.
 The problem is that it's really fucking hard to make fights look convincing on film, and fight coordinator (and director, if the Kickstarter page is to be believed) Mark Strange is not, as of yet, up to the task. Have you ever had a bunch of bored friends decide to stage a mock fight? Well, that's what this looks like.
 I give it an A for effort, but it would be much easier to root for if the script wasn't an absolutely insufferable puddle of wank. It has the gall to make its own premise incredibly stupid, and then make the ending 'twist' a rebellion against that incredibly stupid premise. It's also wrapped in the sort of self-serious tone that mars so many student films and makes them feel rank with pretension... so, seriously, fuck this noise.
 There is a laughably, endearingly naff shot of flooded London that made me laugh, at least.

 Arla Piacentini's Hold Me Til The End is particularly painful, because it almost works. Em is stuck in a time-loop with her lover Jess; Every whorl of the loop has Em trying, unsuccessfully, to keep Jess from killing herself. It's a horrific premise, somewhat undone thanks to... well, just how ridiculous it is, and a spotty execution that can be wholly excused by the low budget; This short feels significantly less polished than all of the other entries, something that actually works on its favour: it feels a little rawer than all the rest, a sole spot of colour.
 It overstays its welcome, the (heart-felt) ending feels a way too didactic, and there's a disastrous, hilariously botched attempt to recreate the head-shaking blurred movement effect from Jacob's Ladder, if you remember that. But flawed as it is (and it is very flawed), this one mostly achieves what it's going for - I kind of like it.

 The last short is William Brooke's Re-Birth, an insufferable exercise in slow-burn Lynchian dream-like atmospherics that has little to offer beyond its production values and formal chops. It looks really great, and I hope it works as a calling card for everyone involved. Other than that, it's an absolute slog with next to no payoff.

 So, all in all, this is a really underwhelming collection - the best segments are OK, and the bad are really, really dire. Acting is mostly mediocre throughout, which is understandable and forgivable, and the FX work can best be described as cheap and cheerful; Most of them are gore effects, and none of them are memorable.
 What most surprised me is how great most of the movies look and sound: these are some very slick no-budget short films, with the music on Burn, for example, being legitimately great. But that comes hand-in-hand with a certain soullessness, and that's not a good tradeoff.