UNDEAD SHIKSA'S MARTINI SHOT

            It was a tough blow for Undead Shiksa Pictures. After a full day of intense filmmaking under the gun, they’d done their best. And their best, apparently, hadn’t been good enough.
     Two days prior, they had been handed several elements that needed to be placed in their film in order to qualify for entry into the annual Martini Shot Film Festival. In 24 hours they, along with 48 competing teams, were given a film genre, a type of animal, an occupation, a disease and a line of dialogue and were expected to produce cinematic genius no longer than seven minutes long. All 48 teams were given different elements to keep it interesting. The Undead Shiksa team wound up with the horror genre, a film style they excelled at. Their previous projects had titles like "Yoga Booty Bloodbath" and "Hellbeast," so you could say that they were steeped in such things. The animal they were required to work into the film was a ferret. The soundman at Shiksa already owned one, so that base was covered. The occupation was milkman. An odd one, but they figured no odder than ferret. E-Bola was the disease and that seemed to be an easy thing to work in, given the genre. And finally, the line of dialogue was, "A tomato is not a vegetable." This last one kept them stumped for a while, but by the time they’d stayed up bouncing ideas around and getting a screenplay written, they’d found a place for it that seemed to make sense. At the end of the writing and casting selection, they set out into the night with every piece of equipment they had at their disposal. Tiny, expensive cameras were prepped, a strong box containing several lights was checked and double checked, dolly tracks and portable boom mics, side-car mounts and odd assortments of props and costumes, along with the ferret and copious amounts of fake blood were packed into their van. They were prepared to hit this head-on.
     The storyline was as follows. Britain, 1980’s. A milkman named Toliver Bentley was making his morning rounds like any other day. As he’s cruising along in his milk trolley with his faithful pet ferret Nigel by his side, an emergency bulletin comes on the radio. A strain of bad beef tips had been served to the patrons of the King’s Pier Pub and in turn, had created a race of flesh-eating, blood-spewing zombies. The film follows Toliver just trying to finish his route, encountering the infected and zombified victims of the infected, battling them along with Nigel doing his part. At one point, Toliver falls asleep while hiding in his trolley from the zombies. Margaret Thatcher, in a dream sequence, spouts cryptic phrases to him like, "A tomato is not a vegetable," "Milk will set you free" and "I apologize for the Falklands." Toliver awakens only remembering the milk line and curses Thatcher for the Falklands as he douses every E-Bola zombie with milk, which turns them back into normal patrons, thirsty for another pint at King’s Pier. In the end, Toliver and Nigel save the day and get everyone in the United Kingdom their milk on time. Fade to black. Credits.
     An ambitious story, to be sure, but the Undead Shiksa crew tackled it with aplomb. In 10 hours, they’d shot all of the footage they needed and zipped back home to edit it.
     Upon looking at the footage, they noticed that in various spots, ghostly images and very obvious phantom figures appeared on the tape as they downloaded it onto their hard drive.
     While the editor searched through footage for a clean set of takes, the director had a premonition. "This would be the ultimate horror film," he said. "A horror movie within a horror movie." As time was tight, the rest of the Shiksa team agreed that although they weren’t fully convinced that the images were actually ghosts, the finished product would have to do.
     The night of the screening, their seven minute magnum opus, "Milkman," got a great response from the audience of competing teams, most of them letting out enthusiastic waves of "ooohs" during the ghost image sequences. However, when all the votes were tallied, Undead Shiksa were discouraged to learn that they had come in second to last, right in front of a post-apocalyptic drama about a folksinger and a "Friends" parody done in stop motion with stuffed animals.




-SLL