User Reviews

The film starts with a woman in a shopping mall, being followed by a man wearing a bizarre clown(?) mask. The woman meets with her friend at a perfume desk, and they begin a weird, run-together, monotone conversation, the voice dub seemingly very different from what they are actually saying. The masked man is staring at them in the background. The rest of the film shows flashes of the straight haired woman dancing in an unusual way with the masked man and buildings collapsing, along with pictures and videos of the woman slowly fading into strange statues and figures. Mind you, the whole time you can hear a woman singing in the background. The man who was following the woman ends up being shot and killed by the woman's friend from the perfume desk. They eat the man's body, both of the women naked, drinking wine, and dispose of the remaining bones in a garbage bag. They watch the bag being taken by the garbage truck. I enjoyed the film, and I'm happy to say that I have already shown it to my mom, and she loves it.

Made with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, video artist Cecelia Condit's nightmarish short has had many lives: as an art project to help her heal from her past, as a scare tactic shown on the 700 Club and a viral video that got shared with no context and was rumored to be a cursed film.

Starting with her film Beneath the Skin, Condit was using her video work to attempt to deal with the cycles of violence that she felt were all around her and so close to her. That's because for a year she dated Ira Einhorn, the Unicorn Killer who also was one of the reasons why we have Earth Day. The entire time that they dated, the rotting body of his ex-girlfriend Holly Maddux was in a trunk. A trunk that Condit constantly walked past, one assumes.

It made it onto religious television because beyond being about the self-destructive behaviors of men toward women, it also looks at female friendships and love. It's lead characters, Sharon and Janice, may be a couple. Or they may just be supportive women. Or both, who are we to put any bounds on their relationship?

It's now become a viral sensation several times, as teens try to copy its strange musical numbers and send it to one another as a curse straight out of The Ring.

Our ladies are just trying to shop for perfume - this was shot at Beachwood Place in Beachwood, Ohio, where Condit sat outside the building manager's office until she was allowed to shoot there; she was given twenty-minute blocks of time which was a challenge - when Arthur begins to stalk them, a man whose face changes with a series of latex masks.

Arthur is the kind of Prince Charming that shows his love to women by hacking them to pieces, his always changing face is a way of showing the roles that abusive men have taken in their relationships. We also discover that Sharon is attracted to violent men, but also likes making them think the violence is their idea. Regardless, love should never cost an arm and a leg.

The songs, written and performed by Karen Skladany (who also plays Janice), are insidious in the way that they worm they way into your brain while this is the kind of weirdness that is completely authentic in a way that today's manufactured social media creepypasta weirdness cannot even hope to be a faint echo of.

As frightening as this can be, it's also a film about absorbing - eating a cannibal is one way, right? - and getting past the worst moments of life without being destroyed by them. This also lives up to so much of what I love about SOV in that while we've been taught that the 80s looked like neon and sounded like a Carpenter movie, the truth is that the entire decade was beige and sounded like the demo on a Casio keyboard. This doesn't nail an aesthetic as much as document the actual 1983 that I lived within, you know, minus the shape-changing cannibal and singsong happy tale of a dog in the microwave.

Consider this absolutely essential and one of the most important SOV movies ever.

While I understand the approach was meant to be strange and almost surreal, nothing was quite interesting enough to hold my complete attention. I think the idea would work with a few tweaks. The first part of the film has our two main characters walking around the mall and focussing their attention on a perfume store. The cannibal was very obviously following them and was acknowledged. It would've been scarier if only we (the audience) could see him in the background watching and stalking as the women continued their musical review of the mall. Instead it opens with shots of the cannibal and constantly shows all the characters together. The fact that he's constantly like only ten feet behind them makes him come off as friend-zoned and dimwitted. It was a bit disappointing considering his distorted mask has potential to make this scary. The later half of this film was a bit more what I was after. The shots of a woman sleeping along with a parallel to a rotting corpse was pretty creepy because it felt like it was foreshadowing. The cannibal's role was a bit more threatening later but I still wouldn't call him scary. When he talked, he sounded impaired. I guess the two main characters killing and eating him was unexpected but not shocking. They were weird too. Oddly enough, this takes away any element of horror I'd associated with the cannibal because now the main characters are just as bad. Maybe this was a bit too artsy for my taste, but I think it really had potential to be something scary if the directing was a bit better.

"Possibly in Michigan" is an American live action short film from 1983, so this one has or rather had its 40th anniversary this year and the writer is Cecelia Condit, who is still working a filmmaker in 2023, even in terms of short films, but yeah given the quality here, I am not surprised she has made any progress in almost half a century and possibly should have taken a different career path. Anyway, she uploaded these under twelve minutes on her Youtube channel for everybody to watch, but as you can see from my rating, I really would not recommend it. I mean many people have done beautiful things film-wise without a budget and often you did not see the absence of money, but here Condit sadly has not. Let's look at the basics: Early on we have two women at a shopping mall and there is also another person around who is wearing a weird mask and maybe seems to be stalking the females. On a side note, apparently this character with the mask is not played by the man we see later on, but by Condit herself? More money saved. But the two women are not really scared or running or anything really, so no clue what was going on there. If they even realize he was there. Later on, one of the two walks literally right by him and still shows no reaction. It just doesn't make sense. Police are also not existent apparently, but garbage disposal companies are. You could ask a hundred other questions about this film where it makes no sense: Why is nobody else at the mall? Why is the guy wearing a mask if he definitely draws attention to him then.

You can also keep asking questions about what happens afterwards at the house where one woman lives. Why is the guy(?) all of a sudden there out on the street wearing a mask again? Why is the mask suddenly gone when he enters the house? Why is he credited as Prince Charming? A clumsy unsuccessful shot at irony/sarcasm? Honestly, the next thing would have been him bringing flowers because of the actor's name? If he is really some strange weirdo, then why do the two kiss passionately before it escalates? We then hear his strange suggestion where he offers his girlfriend(?) two choices that are both not exactly in her favor. Apparently then the other woman (an actual Karen) enters the house armed despite not having been warned by her friend, who is by the way played by the somewhat attractive Jill Sands. Oh, now is this where you give me the explanation that she obviously recognized the guy following? There is just too much off with this film and I don't need a 100% rational movie where you can explain everything (on the contrary, a little mystery is appreciated indeed), but here nothing makes sense and simply saying the explanation is that there is no rationality, there is no plot, nothing is supposed to make sense, is not enough from my perspective. Maybe this is one of the films that you indeed only appreciate more when you are under the influence, but obviously I want to encourage everybody to stay sober and an awful film that looks also really amateurish is not going to change my mind there. People in Michigan should hope that the title is a lie because it gives a bad name to their home state.

It is probably a good thing that none of the three "actors" here have been in anything else really according to imdb. One of them apparently usually rather worked in the music department and she is also credited there for this film here. What you hear is maybe even more bizarre than what you see and maybe also a bit better. I would say that with a better visual side in terms of everything the audio could have been part of a decent film in fact. There the psychedelic component really comes into play, even if I still wonder what was up with dogs in this film. They do not seem to have an easy time or rather the poodle we hear about did not. The ones we see are alright, but they are also not poodles. So yeah, anything else to say? Maybe only that I am baffled by this film's relatively high rating on imdb (north of 7/10) and almost having ten million views on Youtube in five years. Absolutely inexplicable. I hope the reason is not people pushing this as a movie about strong female characters, because that would really be the cyanide icing on the poisonous cake. I think this film was a mess, a failure through and through with terrible camera work and editing too and not even a film that falls in the category of being so bad that it is good again or worth seeing because of how much of a mess it is. It is just poor from beginning to end. I highly recommend to stay away and I am glad it ended so quickly. It still felt longer and pointless. This is Ittenbach territory. And no, I don't mean any of that as a compliment. A definite contender for worst American short film from 1983. At least it did not manage to score any awards attention.