Le Queloune /

Frankly, I'm just happy that Patrick Boivin has uploaded another short film to Openfilm. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of his battle-of-the-toys stop-motion extravaganzas (especially Black Ox Skateboard and Jazz with a General Problem), but they simply don't compare to seeing his artistry on display in narrative form. We have Radio on the PatrickBoivin channel and The Bean on the PhylactereCola channel. Now we have Le Queloune.

It concerns one Patrice Le Vignoble, a fat, John Wayne Gacy-like clown who died an untimely death at the age of 49. The movie opens with an amusing scene of kids making Coca-Cola explode by mixing it with Mentos. The soda seeps through the grave and drips onto poor old dead Patrice, who ain't dead for very long. What's funny about this character is that he's extremely lazy. He takes an awful long time to climb out of that grave. Days, it seems.

I've never seen a zombie origin story quite like this one. We've seen movies in which vampires discover and struggle with their predilections, but very few have dealt with zombies in that way. Boivin shows a lot of imagination in his screenplay. How would a zombie discover he likes the taste of flesh? By trying a piece of his own, of course. Then he'd move onto other people, and then start frying hunks of meat in a skillet. (This is a zombie with very refined tastes, don't cha know?)

What I like most about this filmmaker is that he really goes for it. I'm sure that, once they're in the editing room, most filmmakers would like to have a shot like the one in Le Queloune where the soda is seeping down through the dirt. What's different about Boivin is, not only does he WANT that shot, but he GETS it. The color scheme of the film - white mixed with bloody splotches of red - is pitch-perfect. As is the final scene, which puts Patrice in the context of a much larger outbreak.