Nicky's Holiday

The sheep puppets are back. Nicky is dead. His wife, by his grave, reflects on the holiday in which he died and the many failed attempts on his life, in the many different countries visited during that trip. Short and sweet with an effective ending this puppets against a bluescreen did its job. The voice acting was good and the audience had a few laughs! Not really a horror but entertaining enough!

A very basic story, held up by great backdrops, props and makeup for the puppets. Also, I'm no expert, but it looked like pretty good puppeteering too. I was entertained, but would have liked to see a bit more depth and horror in the story.

This was a really fun film. The use of sheep puppets with various costumes and "make-up" was hilarious. The "lipstick" taped onto one sheep in particular cracked me up. Good audio for the dialogue, and good creepy background music for the parts that called for it. Fantastic use of the line and a great conclusion. I loved the sheep exploding out of the ground at the end. Things to work on: There was a bit of green screen spill noticeable on some of it, so investing in a more powerful chroma key plug-in would be a benefit if you were to do this again. Some of the technical aspects would have benefitted from some tightening up, but the story and sheep were so charming that it really didn't detract from the production. Great film.

So structurally, this film feels a bit like the telling of a long joke, setting up, setting up, and then the punchline is our familiar required line of dialogue. It’s short and sweet, and didn’t outstay its welcome. This was the second of two films in this heat that were puppeted in some fashion, which broke up the selection nicely, and each of the two films had a very different style. Here we had basic puppets and set pieces in front of a bluescreen, and the effect was sketchy but charming. The simple story relates how hapless Nicky Brick came to meet his maker, with his grieving widow relating the series of unfortunate incidents that non-fatally befell him. I liked that this film wasn’t overly ambitious, it just knew what it was trying to do and did that really well.