Welcome to The Shortening! For February, we adjust the height on our camera to focus on movies featuring vertically challenged villains. If you have your own blog or podcast and plan to do the same, be sure to leave a note in the comment with your links!
Fairy tales are the most public of all domains, but it still feels risky to tackle a property so perfectly immortalized on film already.
Quick Plot: Tim and Emma have recently moved from NYC to a sprawling country estate. Pregnant Emma is taking a break from her successful interior design, while Tim continues to run his wholesale yarn business.
They are a very, very dynamic couple.
Life gets wild when Emma discovers a basket of yarn sitting in a corner. HOW COULD SUCH A THING HAPPEN? she wonders, not satisfied with Tim's casual suggestion that maybe the previous owners forgot to pack it up. She stresses even more when she reads about a bear attack nearby, prompting my favorite cinematic rule: Chekhov's Law of Bear Traps.
Tim has his own reasons to worry. Buried in the yarn is a mask, and as we all know, nothing is more irresistible than putting a mysterious bit of plaster over your face.
Rumpelstiltskin is born! I guess?
Pop quiz: what do you know about this fairy tale? It's certainly one of the darker stories we tell children, teaching them to not make promises they don't intend on keeping (that IS the moral, right?). A quick recap:
A miller brags about his daughter, embellishing her talents to claim that she could spin straw into gold. A jerky king takes him up on it with the bet being his daughter's life or marriage (coincidentally, this is also how I met my husband). The young woman is devastated to realize she's about to be executed when salvation comes via a mysterious imp who does the job for her on one condition: his payment will be her firstborn child. Fast forward to the happy couple's pregnancy interrupted by the little magician coming to collect. He agrees to break the contract if she can figure out his unusual name. Thankfully, this guy is an even bigger braggart than the new princess's father, revealing himself to be Rumpelstiltskin in a drunken dance. She names him, he explodes, and everyone else lives happily ever after, save for the day they have to explain to their children what brought them together.
Anyway, Rumpelstiltskin is a pretty messed up tale for children. But it's also pretty rad, hence why we have some great adaptations (Faerie Tale Theater, I'm looking at you). It's PERFECT fodder for a cheap horror movie.
And yet.
This is bad. This is very, very bad. So bad that it doesn't even understand how to use a public domain horror story to just direct its script. Did writer/director Brett Bentman just see open a library book to a picture of Rumpelstiltskin that showed an imp, pregnant woman, and loom and think that these were the keywords of the story? There's no bargain or bragging. Our only reference to gold comes in Emma's yuppie friend's husband who has a lot to say about crypto, then dies while filming most of his scenes in a completely different location than his killer.
But that's not the worst of it.
I don't know how to say this easily, so I'm going to take an acting lesson from Rumpelstiltskin's star. Picture me mumbling, shifting weight on my feet, and scrunching my nose as I quickly blurt this out:
This Rumpelstiltskin is not short.
When Tim, a man of average height, dons this mask, he simply morphs into it and goes about killing at his 5'9 frame.
It's bullshit.
You may be thinking, "Emily! How can you close out the Shortening with such a villain?" and I excuse myself with three defenses:
1) The character is still constantly referred to as an imp
2) This was the second attempt I took at watching a low budget short-powered horror movie only to discover the killer was NOT SHORT. Folks, I watched a Canadian horror comedy called Scared Shitless which is mostly what you think it was (though slightly better than it sounds). I couldn't do this again
3) By the time I realized this movie wasn't going to pay for any kind of effect to change the height of our villain, I was more than halfway done with the film. Time, like me, is short. I wasn't going to waste it.
So that's that.
High Points
At a mere 78 minutes long, I can thankfully say that even if you (for whatever insane reason) decide to watch this movie, at least it won't take much time out of your life. Also, bear traps
Low Points
The fact that I'm trying to remember how the movie ended, and if indeed it actually ended, might be one of many
Lessons Learned
Never underestimate expense reports
The worst spun yarn gives the best stitch definition
Sometimes you can judge a movie by its cover
Rent/Bury/Buy
I've had a surprisingly successful run of cheap-looking movies being way better than their titles and posters suggested this month. That ends here. If you're STILL a glutton for punishment, you can watch this on Peacock or, not surprisingly, Tubi. Don't say I didn't warn you. perfectly immortalized on film already.
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