The Scarlet Avenger

Okay, so this is highly unorthodox for me but since the director is a struggling film director and the short pretty good, I figured I'd help out in spreading the word. The short film is a little less than 30 minutes called The Scarlet Avenger and is modeled after the old television serials like The Flash and Superman which starred George Reeves who was recently played by Ben Affleck in the so-so movie Hollywoodland. After having seen the film, it does an excellent job of maintaining the lighting and the sense of early film as the old serials did. Even a lot of the characterizations and the dialogue was spot on with the early days of television. It was also nice to see a lot of camera work with the zooms and cloesups and random cuts and especially the fun circle matte edits. It's plainly obvious that the director did his homework enough to construct the prototypical serial story and be able to film it correctly. I would actually like to see more if it if given the chance with some characterization thrown in that wasn't haphazard feeling due to time constraints. Also, the actors needed a little work as did some of the editing and dialogue. I noticed a couple of times where characters would say things like damn or dang which dang is too modern of a word and damn would NEVER have been permitted by the censors from back then. Just my pickiness though, I'm sure. The editing though is really good until you get into some of the action sequences where the placement of things simply don't make sense and a lot of cuts are made to simply make a lot of cuts to make it feel jumpy and energetic, which is good but could have been handled slightly better. As for the actors, well, its obvious they weren't fighters. Also, if this is a loving spoof, it wasn't that much of a spoof, tried a couple of times but didn't succeed. The actors just weren't as familiar with the style as the script required. Perhaps many episodes of Adam West as Batman would have helped them. Either way, I love the Skull and the scenery and costumes are all quite elaborate for such a production. The story is fun and its a nice nostalgic romp through serial land. I vote that you go see it on YouTube and then email the guy about possibly making it a bunch of webisodes in a similar vein to Red VS Blue.

3.8 out of 5

Wannabe