SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2022 REVIEW! With his twisted short Your Houseplants Are Screaming, writer/director/star Benjamin Roberds will blow your mind. The viewer is taken to another universe where plants are the dominant life form. Humans are used as houseplants as well as for building material.
The house the film takes place in is built from organs, bones, and muscles. There is a screaming human in a flower pot in a room inhabited by a giant walking plant. The walking plant brings in a pot with a budding human in it. The older, wiser human houseplant teaches the bud the rules of the world. He explains that even though the walking plant seems to be standing still, it is moving very slowly. What feels like a few seconds to the creature is actually several days in human time.
The older human tells the bud of the flesh forest that lays just outside, which he glimpsed through the tooth-lined window. There the humans grow right up out of the ground and dance in the moonlight. The bud then finds out the more gruesome facts of life, which causes him to rebel in disastrous ways. What will the giant walking plant creature do?
“Humans are used as houseplants as well as for building material.”
Your Houseplants Are Screaming is a stone-cold trip. I love how Roberds fleshes out the concept in just 7-minutes. The meat-as-lumber look of the set is beyond belief, and the details therein are fantastic. It looks like someone cut open Puff ‘n Stuff and started living inside him. The candy-colored lighting enhances the already trippy decor, making the stop-animation plant creature look extra sinister.
The special effects and makeup on the human plants are top-notch. Roberds delivers the meat by hamming it up hard in all the human roles, achieving excellent results. The massive pay-off at the end looks exactly like what I saw on black salvia once.
Your Houseplants Are Screaming succeeds in bending the laws of existence in a mentally delicious manner. Mix this short up with your stash if you want to trip out hard. Benjamin Roberds is a fireball talent who someone smart needs to give a feature.
Your Houseplants Are Screaming screened at the 2022 Slamdance Film Festival.
"…succeeds in bending the laws of existence in a mentally delicious manner."
