I attended the Worldwide Short Film Festival once before, in 1997, and since that time it has blossomed from a game of 52 pick-up--the collection of films I saw back then had no business being on the same bill--into a multi-venue, multi-program affair that solicits volunteers and everything. (Remarkably, there was even a trailer for the five-day event the last time I went to the movies.) What I found fascinating about the titles covered herein is that they collectively imply that the tech revolution responsible for the short film's renaissance is now far enough along that the DIY filmmaker's reach has caught up with his/her grasp: not a one of these shorts struck me as particularly amateurish despite the medium continuing to cultivate an air of feasibility. For what it's worth, we had intended to report on both components of the genre-friendly Midnight Mania program, "Freaky" and "Creepy," but asking a critic to return a screener is like asking John Wayne Gacy to babysit, and nobody ponied up the "Creepy" DVD in time to be sent to us for review. My thanks to the Canadian Film Centre for facilitating what they could.-Bill Chambers

Like the little boy beside him whose militant mother repeatedly slaps his hands away from the pieces on display, our protagonist (Michael Moraveck) struggles to look but not touch while browsing an art exhibit. (Specifically tempting are a nipple-like relief painting and an installation of a goldfish swimming around in a blender full of water.) Tacky but politically pregnant, Exhibit 42 is a pithy consideration of the human--particularly male--impulse to violate social quarantines. Too bad it's all a big tease.-BC

Tongue-in-cheek at best, this aggravating would-be lament opens with Winston Lo (Benny Min), a Canadian of Chinese descent, being turned down for the role of a delivery boy because he can't do pidgin English. Enter Foster (Michael Dufays), a white actor from the audition circuit who mentors our hero in the minutiae of the yellowface caricature--and teaches him some martial arts moves while he's at it. The piece, alas, is part of the problem it seeks to expose: it isn't long before a pastiche sensibility takes over, and once that happens, the filmmakers become so preoccupied with doing justice to the likes of "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues" and Jackie Chan's American career as to wind up venerating these contemporary minstrel shows rather than subverting them. A glorification of Uncle Toms desperate for the cynicism of Bobby Lee's brilliant work on "MADtv", Shaolin Delivery Boy cheerfully finds Winston selling out his race for fifteen minutes of fame.-BC

The only attraction here is the animation, harking back as it does to the almost cubist style of DePatie-Freleng's chic '60s output. Forget that patterning a cartoon after '50s educational reels is an idea roughly as stale as starting a poem "roses are red/violets are blue"--Learn Self Defense takes aim at the current administration with its nose pressed against the barnside by having a blusterous narrator (Mark Cook) drill it into pipsqueak-turned-sheriff "George" that diplomacy is for pussies. Did it occur to writer-director Chris Harding that in showing his Bush II avatar to be brainwashed, he actually lets the real deal off the hook?-BC

After office honcho Kevin (Bob Rue) stakes an underling (writer Bruce Dellis) through the heart, Daryl (Brian Ronalds), a colleague of the deceased, naturally asks a lot of questions--and in true corporate fashion, Kevin has an answer for everything, starting with "Mike was a vampire." It's more like a sketch than even comedy shorts usually are and the nihilistic ending aborts any commentary on downsizing, but damn it all, The Netherbeast of Berm-Tech Industries, Inc. is too frickin' funny to resist. And if expounding on the occult in business vernacular ("What you've gotta do is take the granular view of this") is straight out of The Kids in the Hall's playbook, the gambit benefits from the non-insular casting of deadpan Rue, whose picture belongs in the dictionary under "boss." Bonus points for Tim Clark's score, which winningly evokes the music of cheesy '80s horror movies.-BC

It's the dinner scene in Eraserhead reformatted as a sitcom, with the titular man of few words (Roger Peffley, who bears a passing resemblance to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea) showing up at his girlfriend Zelda's place unannounced only to discover that she lives with the Addams Family. The poor creepy bastard is greeted by a variety of emasculations on his descent down the rabbit hole, from the slab of beefcake competing for Zelda's affections to a bout of menstrual terror--the latter intertwined with a nice homage to the bathtub business of Kubrick's The Shining. But let's face it: while Slim looks pretty good and is performed with a blessed lack of self-consciousness, it's become so conventional to depict the nuclear family as a menagerie of grotesques that no matter how sincere writer-director Matthew Caron's intentions, it's impossible to tell whether there's a genuine sensibility at play. In its unpredictable way, the movie is as predictable as they come.-BC

Boasting a sinewy technique that seems anomalous as far as 3-D animation is concerned but that in and of itself suggests a fusion of Bill Sienkiewicz's and Dave McKean's illustration styles, Oscar-nominated Tomek Bagiński's latest Fallen Art is eye candy, no doubt, but its jet-black humour is what truly sets it apart from a rash of Pixar wannabes. According to the film's official literature, "Sergeant Al cultivates his love for young and brave soldiers. Dr Friedrich cultivates his talent for photography. And the old, mentally lost General A creates his art." Fallen Art is actually even more impressionistic than all that, at once a crazed, Hellerian vision of the military and a meditation on snuff filmmaking (which essentially strikes the same bargain war does: immortality in exchange for the right to consider you expendable) that could maybe have only come from the former Eastern bloc, where the devaluation of human life has been seen from both sides of the fence. Bagiński is the most exciting thing to happen to animation in a very long time.-BC

Behold: the holy grail of art schlock, a piece so obscenely pretentious that it's either the worst student film ever made or the best parody of student films ever made. Still, even if we optimistically go with the second option, that doesn't make it anything more than an unwatchable movie with a doctor's note. Basically Carrie with less telekinesis and more eggs (make that ham), Birthday is a waking nightmare not only for us, but also for Mira (Julie Turner, a good screamer), whose Betty Crocker of a mom (Robyn Allan) calmly churns cake batter while her daughter's bedroom transmogrifies into a Cronenbergian chamber of throbbing orifices--apparent harbingers of her imminent return to the womb. Is it feminist or feminine disgust? Thwarting a definitive interpretation, the director's androgynous pseudonym, Erös (yes, Erös), points to nothing so much as his or her own god complex. (Witness the four minutes of closing credits.) On "In Living Color", Jim Carrey used to play a grown man leashed to his overprotective mother by an as-yet-unsevered umbilical cord, and any one of that character's sketches is infinitely more provocative than this sad spectacle of Canadian (n)e(u)rotica.-BC

A ramshackle hybrid of kinky claymation inspired by Moby Dick and performance art in which three people dressed as "bird children" mindlessly consume--among other things--bowls of oatmeal and mice, Egg earns acrimony for its brash appropriation of David Lynch's cone masks. Or maybe that's just the anti-intellectual in me finding a scapegoat for dismissing the film's dollar-book surrealism, which detracts from the uniquely arresting animated sequences. In any event, Egg gets so much mileage out of an Ahab figure with a retractable spyglass for an eye, his bug-eyed first mate, and his pirate-speak (metaphrased in silent-movie intertitles, "ARRR") that the framing device seems perversely vandalistic. Those birds must be albatross.-BC

Mom in Store Now!, from Beautiful Sunday director Tetsuya Nakashima, yanks bubblegum anime by the lapels into the live-action realm, but the results have much more flair than, say, Robert Rodriguez's 3-D crapfests. Proto-Miyazakian in the sense that its adolescent heroine (played by a grown woman (Rie Tomosaka), which hasn't nearly the sexualizing effect you'd anticipate), orphaned to a Bizarro World of infinite danger and possibilities, learns through her misadventures in appointing a surrogate for her preoccupied mother to not peel off the layers of childhood so hastily, it's also a "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" for the new millennium, with the island of misfit toys reimagined as a landfill overflowing with ADD casualties. (A Michael Jackson puppet and a school-dwelling rabbit unfed since the students lost interest in him figure prominently among the refuse.) Like the same year's Thomas in Love, Mom in Store Now! is a kaleidoscopic bellwether of not just an aesthetic but also an ethical symbiosis between cinematic mediums, and though a couple of scatological tangents dispel some of the magic (that's the negative influence of animation), it's gratifyingly nonimmune to Hiroshima anxiety: there's real resonance in a sudden air strike that leads to the bunny's Watership Down-like demise.-BC