Short Film: Shallow Graves

This short comes in at 13.5-minutes, was directed by James Stark and was released in 2020. It is a neat little film that manages to use familiar film scenarios to broadcast its general direction and allow it to build a world that feels impressive for the short run time.

Lawrence and Johnny

It starts with Johnny (Corey Landis, Dracula Reborn) and Lawrence (Juan Blasquez) digging a grave in the desert, there is banter between the two and we get the impression they are “wise guys”. They go to the boot of the car, retrieve the body of Valentine (James Chrosniak) and lay him down in the ‘bed in the dessert’.

out of the grave

They drive to a nearby gas station and Johnny goes to call the hit in to their boss. Meanwhile, as Lawrence eats, he sees a familiar Hawaiian shirt go past. Valentine is up and walking. Lawrence tries to shout for Johnny when the man, blood on his chest, goes into the gas station and emerges with sun glasses and walks away. Johnny eventually returns to the car and is disbelieving of the news… the car fails to start…

James Chrosniak as Valentine

Valentine gets to a diner and, despite the blood on his chest, waitress Maya (Adelaide Lummis) takes his order – cereal without milk, he prefers it that way. Of course, there must be a reason why he is ambulatory (and given the nature of this blog you can guess). Things come to a head when Drew (Mar Sudac), the wayward son of the new sheriff, comes into the diner with his cronies and starts harassing Maya and, of course, Johnny and Lawrence could come in at any time…

cereal, no milk

This was great fun – the wise guys and the delinquent did use standard movie tropes but that shorthand helped concentrate the viewer on the broad brushes of the story. It was done with a sense of class and the vampire aspect was neatly underplayed.

The imdb page is here.