ADVENTURE GIRLS III

Adventure Girls III
Jon Deitcher, Canada, 2010, 1 minute

Adventure Girls III is a short film about two Japanese school girls (played by white women with sunglasses) who drive a stolen car across a flat stretch of America. After thirty-eight seconds we find out they're vampires and watch as they eat a hillbilly hitchhiker. Though the film's title states that this is the third in a series of Adventure Girl shorts, it is actually the first episode of a new web series.

Adventure Girls III is an abrasive short. The voices (taken directly from a Sailor Moon cartoon) are a little too high, the editing is a little too quick and the girls' whining screams are tough to listen to. Most damning, the film is a piece of manufactured kitsch. Bizarre, idiosyncratic films without self-awareness (The Room, Troll 2) will always be more interesting than films that wink and nudge their way to instant cult audiences (Snakes on a Plane, Piranha 3D) because the first type of film is sincerely trying to be a successful movie, while the second type of film is just trying to sneer its way to becoming weird. When Japanese school girl vampires rip up a yokel's neck, and when it's all placed under an intentionally false title, it's hard to see the film as anything but an attempt to create a meme by throwing calculated wackiness on top of calculated wackiness. This short just isn't all that exciting.

That said, I think you should watch Adventure Girls III. You should watch Adventure Girls III because it's one minute long.

I went to the E Street Cinema two days in a row this week. On Thursday I watched a package of eight shorts, the longest of which was twenty minutes long. On Friday, I watched the two hour long Bellflower, which, spoiler alert, features a scene where a man rapes a woman with a knife. Bellflower has received love it or hate it reviews; I would say I like it very much but can still recognize its flaws. I recommended the movie to a friend but noted the shocking violence that kicks in toward the end. He didn't want to watch the movie because, if he didn't like it, he would have wasted two hours of his weekend on a grating, gory, depressing flick. To have a full Bellflower experience, you need to invest two hours into something you may very well hate. To have a full Adventure Girls III experience, you need to invest one minute. The worst thing you'll be able to say is "I wasted a minute."

Adventure Girls III is not a great short, but what is great about it is that it is only boring for one minute. Anybody can spend one minute on a movie. I complained about the girls' screaming, but they only scream for 15 seconds. Sometimes it's difficult to pick up a potentially polarizing book or album, but wondering whether or not to watch a polarizing short film is never a hard decision. Anybody can have an opinion on Adventure Girls III because even the busiest person has the time to watch and analyze it fully.