Cluster

Director - D. Ryan Mowry (Defective Man)
Starring - Roger Garcia and Reid McIver
Release Date - 2013
Genre - Horror
Tagline - "It's all in his head"
Format - Streaming (Online Screener)

Rating (out of 5):

     I love when I come across a well made short.  Shorts hold all the power of a feature film but do not waste the viewers time if done right.  Most of the time a short uses it's time wisely giving the viewer an action packed flick that can run anywhere short of 30 minutes.  I love watching a good short.  I never feel like I wasted time and I get to see a great story unfold at a decent rate without having to wade through waste deep shit for dialogue.  Recently, I befriended director D. Ryan Mowry and he told me about his 2013 short Cluster.  I'm a sucker for a good short so I asked him if I could check it out and he was kind enough to hook me up with a link to it.  Thanks for allowing me to check it out!

     The film follows a young man who returns home from a hard day at the office to drink a few colds one and unwind in front of the t.v.  However, he soon drifts off to sleep and has terrible nightmares of a mask man breaking into his home and killing him multiple times.

     When I first clicked play I noticed that the film had a running time just a little over 8 minutes.  This made me wonder how much story could a film tell in just that short amount of time.  Once my 8 minutes were up I quickly realized that the purpose was not to tell a story but to give the viewer simple entertainment which is something most films have forgot about in recent years.  The acting in this film is hard to judge due to the nature in which it was filmed.  At the base we have a man that just drinks and dies.  He is convincing when he dies but that's about the only thing we can say about that.  The second actor just wears a mask and kills which is really hard to judge as well.  The story for this one is very bare but it works well for the way the film was shot.  The purpose of this film is to showcase several death scenes with nothing complicated to wrap around that.  I liked that approach.  Finally, the film has several kill scenes of a wide variety.  We have a hammer smashing a skull, a drill drilling into a skull, a shot to the eye, all within 8 minutes.  The practical effects for these kills are solid as well making them very effective.  Overall, Cluster is a simple yet brutal short that is not a waste of 8 minutes.  Check it out!