1 out of 5

Director: Spencer Susser

I was iffy on Susser’s ‘Hesher’ because I felt it was too tonally mixed to birth something new, but it did earn it watching worth by slowly working on its concepts for an hour and half.  Stripped to 14 minutes, ‘I Love Sarah Jane’ mines minimized versions of similar emotions – loss, love – but has an uncomfortable big scale concept / small scale presentation feel to it and without the extended runtime, Susser’s lil’ flick just feels pointless.  Not bad, so I’m sorry about that one star, but pointless.  I can’t recommend it because it didn’t add anything to my existence except that I’ve watched it, but by the same token its nothing I would spit on or say to outright avoid, and if Spencer continues to evolve his skills (which are there, just applied in a fashion not yet quite appealing to me), perhaps it will become an important artifact to re-examine.

Open shot of little kid biking through chaos and dead bodies.  As with ‘Hesher’s’ opening, there’s this mixed bag of humor and pathos: hey, he just biked through a body torn in half, hyuck, but hey, he the skies are all moody and he’s lookin’ rather sad, unhyuck.  He bikes to someone’s house; someone ends up fitting the mold of dirty, snotty, bratty Australian kid (see ‘Eden Lake’ or, wow, any Australian film for more examples of this template) and they gather bows and arrows and bags of unknown material and then travel to meet some other boys, who happen to have a zombie roped up in the backyard of Sarah Jane.

When I saw the zombie I admittedly rolled my eyes.  Okay, post-apocalypse, whoopee.  Our lead boy doesn’t have much interest in torturing the zombo with the snotty-nosed brigade, and instead goes inside to make goo goo eyes at Sarah.

There are some impressive in-frame camera effects (what I’m starting to see as an expectation for these Blue Tongue shorts (not an unwelcome one, mind you)), some random dialogue which tickles at deeper concepts – again à la Hesher – and some violence.  But I can’t put it all together.  The big scale / small screen thing to which I referred is the way Susser films this zombie world.  It’s all trash strewn and filthy and he does a couple long or distant shots to indicate that this is the new status quo, but I feel like things could’ve been more effective without those ‘establishing’ bits.  They indicate a larger palette than the truly small scope within which his characters are actually functioning.  Its only necessary as an excuse for the zombie and to give us a quick and easy reason for these kids to be on their own.  This all could’ve been accomplished just through the zombie and the backgrounds.  It’s absolutely enough of a trope to get by on that, unless Susser just wanted to show off some FX or try out a lens or something.  Who knows.  And to the story – In ‘Hesher,’ the violence rubbed up against other elements which made the flick interestingly imbalanced; ‘Sarah Jane’ suggests that Susser actually just finds the violence and reprobate behavior funny.

Lastly, just a note on the acting – I didn’t feel that there was a very good command of the kids here.  Further adding to my separation from the flick was that every glance and motion felt rather unnatural.

Took you longer to read this than watch it, yeah?  I like the genre film / short used as a vehicle for something else.  But the combo has to be justified in some way. otherwise it becomes the movie marketing pitch of ‘X meet Y’ … both in concept and execution.  ‘I Love Sarah Jane’ has the seeds of an amusing / affecting dramedy (drama..dy?) thing, but the zombie background is too overused and the foreground too undeveloped.  Watchable, not memorable.