5/film review: fool's day

a review for the short film fool's day (it's good but gory)

Fool's Day - Cody Blue Snider - United States - 2013

This is a review for the short film Fools Day. You can watch it on YouTube here. Spoilers ahead!!!

When I went into this movie, I knew what to expect: a family-friendly, light-hearted comedy. I didn’t realise just how wrong I was.

This comedy/thriller movie is set in a typical American elementary school, a setting so faultless and bright. That is until the teacher’s head literally implodes: a classroom’s innocent April Fool’s prank has ended up in an unexpected and catastrophic outcome. It becomes every classmate’s mission to cover up the accident and pretend like it never happened, but it doesn’t end well.

I was definitely not expecting that. I didn’t watch the trailer for this film, so I didn’t realise that anyone was going to die in general, let alone have their head explode into a khjillion pieces. I’m a bit of a dark comedy fan, but since I didn’t know that this film was going to be like that, it added an extra layer of “happy and fun setting with a gory and horrifying concept”, which was executed (pun may or may not have been intended) in a very well-written and well-acted way.

The camera work on this film is nowhere short of genius. There are some shots where the camera is inside of the classroom and you can see that the centre point of the composition is what you'd probably see in a regular school, but in the background, very subtly, you can see the kids dragging the teacher's dead body around. It just adds the cherry on top of the layer of "happy and fun setting with a gory and horrifying concept". (It also might just be because I love the 'subtle foreshadowing' trend). There is also a montage of shots of kids screaming with a cheerful pop song as the soundtrack. There is a static shot of the class of kids facing the teacher just after her head explodes which lats for about 5 seconds. This amplifies the shock on all their faces.

The sound design could've been cleaned up a bit, however. There were some parts of the film that would've worked out perfectly with just the ambience of the school, but the music was laid on top of it, which in some cases threw me off. The sound effects were pretty good, though, and were used at the right times. They weren't used too often, and I kinda like that because you can focus more on the story progression.

The film didn't use that much CGI or VFX or anything of the sort, but it needn't have. The clever usage of acting along with some camera trickery which I can't find how they did the blood splatter (maybe it was someone splashing it off-camera) was enough to set the scene.

The ending was the only bit that felt strange. I was half-expecting the teacher to pop out of the toilet when the police officer drank the coffee to say something like “Don’t drink that! It’s given me the absolute worst stomach ache.” That would’ve been a much funnier ending but, hey, the officer’s head imploding too was also kinda humorous.

Overall, 4 stars out of 5. Although some parts could definitely use some improvement, the majority of it was executed well. (Alright, I'll stop using that pun)