Shopping at Target can be a literal bitch. Just ask Misty Mundae. A trip to the cheap-n-cheerful store, where she was given the evil eye by some old “freaky f*****g lady” (as she puts it), resulted in inspiration for the youthful scream queen in writing and directing this five-minute horror short. Maybe more filmmakers should shop at Target if that’s the case.
A buxom witch sits topless and sticks pins into a voodoo doll. Mundae, asleep in bed, starts to twitch and thrash and bleed, and eventually ends up dead on her floor. And, well, that’s it. “Voodoun Blues” has clearly been released to cash in on her popularity amongst her growing fanbase. It’s a 16mm monochrome film school effort, and should be looked upon as such, some sorta embryonic modern-day Maya Deren celluloid ritual. There’s some nifty-looking old school stop-motion animation on display here, and the filmmaker credits the critically lauded, once-banned Polish animator Jan Svankmajer for inspiration in this field. So she’s clearly got more on her mind than tits and a*s.
Other features on the DVD include an interview with Mundae about how she came up with the idea for the film, and a documentary about the making of the short’s blues soundtrack, where she wanted to use Screamin’ Jay Hawkins doing “I Put A Spell On You” but was forced to record her own song for budgetary reasons. The only interesting aspect of this mini-doc is the inclusion of John Fedele (Mundae’s co-star in numerous T&A efforts) on drums on the song.
Included here too are two other brutal, visceral short films by Mundae co-conspirators: “Night Of The Whorror Hoppers” (a gory surreal demented meditation on, umm, what I’m not exactly sure, but it has female nudity and meat being stabbed in the bath, if that helps any) by “Voodoun” star Katie Bordeaux; and “Sour Milk” (starring Mundae in a cameo, and being about suicide and loss of childhood innocence) by Joe Miller, which have obviously been added to pad out the DVD’s running time. Both these shorts are worth watching, if suffering a wee bit from art-cum-underground-film use of clichéd ‘shocking’ images.
All in all, if you want to see Misty’s class project, whilst wondering what she will be able to make features-wise when she finishes learning about film, then this is for you. Nobody else will give a damn. But what shines through in this DVD EP is the woman’s dedication to her craft. She b*****s about learning film on archaic equipment, and cutting film on an old-fashioned Steenbeck (getting bruised hands in the process), but it’s clear she wears her bruises like a badge of honor and is fiercely proud of suffering for her (and I use the word loosely) art. Personally, I can’t wait to see what she comes up with when she graduates. Bring it on m’dear, bring it on…
