SXSW Film

Midnight Shorts

The big drag about feature films is that you get caught up in horrible distractions like caring about the characters. That just gets in the way of the fun. Curated under the loose banner "short films for stoners" (which could explain why it's called Midnight Shorts but starts at 11pm), this collection of 13 shorts revels in the discomfort, death, pukiness, and all-round misery that can be inflicted by filmmakers on their unsuspecting characters. "Spider" is a sweetly ghoulish tale of practical jokes that disproves the saying, "it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" (that's actually when the laughing really starts). Then there's "Show and Hell" and "The Adventures of Baxter & McGuire," a pair of animated shorts that would make Spike and Mike chortle. But "Frog Jesus" proves the quicker the punch, the sweeter the hit. In the first of a double whammy by director Ben Peters (he also helmed "The Heist"), a small child provides divine inspiration to amphibians with a hammer and some nails.