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The Collective, Vol. 1: The Meat Eater (2011)

DVD Cover (JABB Pictures)
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Overall Rating 71%
Overall Rating
Ranked #15,061
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JABB pictures challenged 9 other independent filmmakers to create a 10 minute short film based on a predetermined synopsis. The synopsis for V.1 of The Collective is, "The Meat Eater". It was up to each filmmaker to decide who, or what, that meant to them. The films range from brutal to bizarre, with each filmmaker putting their own unique twist on the idea. They were given only 2 months to complete this project. 9 filmmakers stepped up to the challenge. --Official Site
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Review by Ginose
Added: January 29, 2012
I've said time and again that I love anthology horror films, and this continues to be true, but I've never been totally sure how I feel about collective film efforts. Small collections of short films by different artists are hardly the same kind of thing as an anthology of shorts, but with such an intriguing idea as "The Meat Eater" had, it was hard to turn it down: Ten separate directors all work on making a short film based on the single premise of "A small town is terrorized by a creature called the Meat Eater". I figured it'd be a groovy little collection of short monster movies but I was happily surprised to be wrong here.

This collection offers WAY more variety than I figured it would, giving us such a wide-variety of pieces, from one that takes the premise very seriously, to one that makes an extremely creepy short documentary piece out of the material, to one that's about FUCKING KAIJU FROM THE FUTURE BROUGHT TO US BY VEGAN TERRORISTS. All of these spots had A LOT of variety and some amazing ideas to be sure, but this was part of the bigger problem with the material, I feel. It offered so many takes and so many ideas that very few stuck and quite a few ended up downright boring (if the makers of these pieces don't know I'm talking about theirs, then they need to consider a new field, because FUCK your six and a half minutes of a girl walking through the snow) and drug down the flow of the production.

Quite a lot DID work, however, including the acting and pacing in a lot of the longer segments, which I had dreaded as being the more boring of the pieces, but was, again, happily wrong. I found myself quite entranced in many of the stories (particularly the short documentary piece) and was almost sad when they ended. Meh, however, to the truly auteur shorts, as I don't think any of them truly became what they thought they were, and almost all of them had little grasp on the (as we came to see) VERY loose synopsis and range they were given. Shame on you.

For quite some time I struggled to do this review for a multitude of reasons, most of them purely personal, but quite a few were based more on my perception of modern art and independent filmmaking; I've had a lot of thinking to do on pieces of art that I've desired, strongly, to love but in the end could not and that brings me quite harshly to this piece.

I've given it a good few viewings (watching a few segments in the up point of four or five times) and I can safely say that, while I loved every aspect of this production, there is absolutely no way I can advise "The Collective: The Meat Eater" to anyone on its own merits. It's a fine assembly of shorts, but only three out of ten are truly enjoyable in any real way. This saddens me to say, but I did not love this film.

2.2/10.
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