​FILM GUTTER: Nekro (1998)

By Alex Davis 

COME ON IN, THE WATER'S APPALLING...

Dir. Vince Roth/Mick Nards, USA, 16 mins

Well how could you go wrong with a title like that? After all, we've had great fun with the likes of Nekromantik and Nekromantik 2 around these parts. There's also a Japanese movie by the very same name, which I will be coming to some time, but this is the cult 1998 short film from the US. And of course the clue is rather in the title...
 

Nekro follows an unnamed male protagonist, who after pulling up to his house drags out a struggling female victim and locks her in an upstairs room. When she comes to, screaming and banging on the door, her captor simply bursts into the room, stabs her repeatedly with a knife and then proceeds to have sex with the dead body left behind.
 
Well, that was a snap review, wasn't it? Shall we all go home early?
 
There is a bit more to it than that, because there's a sort of voiceover exploring the nature of rage and frustration. There's also a somewhat unpleasant and distorted soundtrack to accompany things, which is effective initially although does become a little grating towards the finale. The visuals are grim and grimy, at times a little too dark to truly see what's actually going on at all. The performances are serviceable – there's nothing much to be acted, and barely a line of dialogue, but what is there is works fine.
 
With that good and bad summed up, I think what it ultimately boils down to is that there's not really enough here to really get your teeth into. We've had some cracking short films in these pages – Cutting Moments was a standout, and Nacho Cerda's Aftermath covers this same horrible ground in what I think is a better way. But on occasions a short film can just feel a bit too light, and I'm afraid that's the case here. With a quarter of the runtime taken up by closing and opening credits, what you effectively have is 12 minutes of murder and necrophilia that doesn't really have a great point or meaning to it. What you're actually left with kind of feels like some sort of extreme metal video rather than a short film as I would recognise it.
 
RATING: 3/10. There's some effort at originality here, mainly in an innovative soundtrack that ultimately becomes annoying – very possibly intentionally so. But with the main feature running just 12 minutes and that featuring only one real scene it's hard to get too carried away with this one. Combine that with a very dark colour scheme that had me squinting all the way through and all I can give it is a nearly-dead 3/10.