USA, 2003
Director: Steve Herold

Four film-festival shorts comprise this disc from New Jersey-based filmmaker Steve Herold. The shortest is T.Fly Boxed, an agreeable cartoon about a fly that Herold created for school. It’s some good-ol’-fashioned animation – that means by hand, people – that never bores. Yeah, so it’s only a minute long, but still…

The real meat lies in the shorts H.R. Pukenshette and Bum Runner. The former is an adults-only parody of the Sid & Marty Krofft H.R. Pufnstuf show, with a newly brokenhearted man unknowingly giving birth to his new best friend after he attempts to drink himself to death and instead pukes up the disgusting title creature. Looking a little like a miniature Grimace covered in, well, puke, H.R. helps get our prematurely balding hero back in the game, as well as in touch with his other bodily functions. Yes, the humor is largely juvenile, but I laughed, and it’s better than 90 percent of anything Saturday Night Live has attempted the past couple of seasons.

Bum Runner is even better, the story of two homeless men (one fat, the other a midget) in search of one last “big score” so they can retire to Crackworld. Said big score is found in the form of a grocery cart full of aluminum cans, being pushed by the recently departed Fred “Rerun” Berry. They steal the cart, and thus begins a chase sequence that cleverly skewers every chase-sequence cliché trotted out by Hollywood, from the upturned fruit stand to the workers carrying a pane of glass. It’s slightly reminiscent of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker Airplane! style of humor, but the best laughs lie in the little details, like the panhandler’s sign reading “IM BLIND – GIMME DIME” or the toothless bum wearing a “WORLD’S #1 DAD” cap.

The final short, Asburied, is the odd man out here. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s serious. It’s an eight-minute black-and-white look at the current state of Asbury Park – all but abandoned – while a narrator lovingly remembers the way it used to be. A nice piece, if existing in another universe entirely.

I liked all the shorts, but I’m most impressed with the disc’s sheer volume of bonus features – interviews, deleted scenes and more – and the cool menu design. Homemade indie films are usually thrown together with little care to how they’re packaged, but the professionalism of the presentation here matches Herold’s comedic skill.

You can find out more about this disc at www.jointfilms.com

Review by Rod Lott.