directed by:
Ty Brueilly written by: Ty Brueilly genre: Horror |
Sometimes, I have those moments where I'll read a synopsis for a film, not being able to make a lick of sense from what I've read, and still feel like I'm going into watching it completely blind. This is one of those times. I read the details that came with "Shucks" and felt like the whole concept flew right on over my head by a clear country mile, and just pushed play anyway. Have you ever had that happen to you before? It's like starting off the bonus round in life with minus points – before this film even started, I felt like it was gonna take a whole lot of effort for me to keep up to Writer/Director Ty Brueilly. I'm always down to try, though. I might not necessarily understand every single thing that comes my way, but the idea of a Silent-Horror-Experimental combo 'seems' up my alley.
Plus, visually, I'm 100% all about this. Ty reveals himself to be remarkably gifted behind the lens right away, from what he chooses to shoot to how "Shucks" instantly takes you out of your world and puts you right into his. My first impression of watching the black & white scenes of "Shucks" come in and out of focus, zooming close and backing out…the overall creepiness of the imagery and background sounds combined…I mean…I want Ty to direct just about every music video ever made from this point forward! It was impossible to tell at the start whether or not his skillset was going to make for the kind of cohesive viewing you'd typically find in a full-length feature movie or film, but in a short burst like a music video, I'm tellin' ya, Brueilly's stylistic perspective would be absolutely perfect to visually support some tunes. As I crept past the ten-minute mark, and the dude onscreen started choppin' corn with, like, a freakin' rusty medieval sword of some kind, I started to have this mini panic attack. What if I didn't get a single damn second about what "Shucks" was all about? Even stranger, what if I still loved it? I have had that happen to me before. I'm by no means any kind of genius or even a moderately smart mind at best, so believe me, it's possible for a concept to fly right by me while still being able to appreciate the art and craft in what someone creates. I look at the small details that stack up in a film like "Shucks," like the setting of a nearly empty room, where you can see all the visual outlines of old pictures that used to hang on the walls long ago. Things like the hanging lamps that have replaced every ounce of electricity & the comforts of light we're familiar with. I love this kind of stuff – but what the hell am I watching!?! When the mask got popped onto the main character about a third of the way into the movie, that's when things began to get even creepier. There might not be a single functional light switch in this empty house, but the television is still happy to flicker eerily as this one dude sits alone in his empty room with his mask on by himself. Weird right? Believe me when I tell ya, "Shucks" doesn't go about getting any more normal than that, I can assure you. Even the show he's watching on television is practically a mirror image of creepy people in masks staring straight back at him, and we end up in this bizarre loop of nightmarish characters that almost seem to be watching each other from completely separate dimensions. Then there's the…you know… I'm just gonna call him the Cornhead guy. You read that correctly…not a Conehead like those in the old Saturday Night Live skits back in the day – a freakin' Cornhead…because for some reason or another, Brueilly has fixated on corn as being a part of this story. What does corn symbolize, you ask? How did corn become personified? Both are great questions! I have absolutely no idea. I promise you that I'm not holding back any information – I literally have no clue as to what the heck any of this could be about, and I'm half-convinced that I'm having an acid flashback.
I think, if I could guess a bit about the midway point in watching "Shucks," I'd probably have told you that this film could very well be about a reversal of roles or perhaps even fortunes. Just imagine for a second – what if the corn shucked YOU instead of the other way around like we're familiar with? I don't know about the world's population of corn numbers in comparison to people, but it does seem like we'd at least have a significant problem on our hands if that were to be the case. Cornhead, is killin' it onscreen…and we kinda have to wonder about whether or not he'll start killin' it for real the longer we watch…as in, people. Surely he's had to watch this farmer guy grab his rusted-ass sword enough times to be splittin' cobs with fierce brutality instead of just grabbing a knife & being respectful about all this corn-murder…you gotta figure that Cornhead has been silently plotting his revenge for a significant amount of time by now. The mask that Brueilly has designed for this freaky character he's conceived is absolutely AMAZING. I don't know that it necessarily strikes terror into ya, but it's kind of got that Clive Barker-esque magic to it - Cornhead is 100% cool to look at no matter what he's doing. Even when he's just standing at the end of the hallway, he's completely badass as badass can be. What makes it even more odd, perhaps, is that no one seems to be put off by his presence – Cornhead seems to be welcome in this house to a degree, which makes us have to wonder whether or not he and our mask-wearin' farmer guy could be one and the same. We get a lot of extended scenes of farmer guy putting his clothes on, too, which…like…I mean, credit where credit is due – I don't know that they're going to go down in history as the most necessary scenes you'll ever see in a film, but Ty is still able to make even these simpler scenes look and feel CREEPY AF. While the film is technically silent in that no characters will utter a word, the soundtrack Brueilly has used to enhance these scenes will cling to your bones. For real, it's sensory stuff from sight to sound, visually and audibly stimulating your senses in ways that I can promise the majority of you ARE NOT USED TO. Once again, even if I don't understand it, and I'm pretty sure that I don't, I can still confirm that I was glued to every solitary second of "Shucks." I LOVE things that are different than everything else, and Brueilly's film is exactly that by every possible definition. Watching this film really begs the question of whether or not we really need to always have a grip on what reality is. Do we necessarily need to understand everything we see in order to enjoy something we watch? I don't really think that's the case, though I'm sure many of you out there would totally disagree with me on that. Ultimately, you have to look at "Shucks" as the art that it IS to wrap your mind around that kind of theory on a conceptual level – we don't understand every single painting we see, we don't understand every song we hear, or movie we watch, 100% -, but we can still really like what we experienced, and it can definitely still make us feel a certain type of way. This might be DARK art, but it's still art nonetheless, and watching something like this is completely memorable, even if it's only because you got to the end and felt like you had NO IDEA what it was you just watched, the whole EXPERIENCE of watching "Shucks" and trying to figure out WTF is going on, is what makes it memorable – make sense? So if you're looking for point-A to point-B, linear style filmmaking… you're gonna want to cruise right on by, but I assure you, Brueilly is comfortable with that – he didn't make this film for YOU. He made "Shucks" to provide an alternative kind of entertainment that we rarely see, and if you happen to enjoy it, cool… I'm sure there's plenty of room on the bandwagon for ya. If you didn't, you're one of a million people who would probably be more comfortable with your Marvel Universe films & Rom-Coms. Brueilly exists to push the threshold of what a cinematic experience can be in his own unique way, and I felt like he pulled that off with "Shucks." I probably didn't get it, but it gets three & a half stars from me. |
|
|
More To Check Out.
|
