The Severed Head Network
Wicked Pixel
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A collection of odd and edgy short films of the sinful, sensual, and sinister! Created by the nation's most infamous underground directors! Sex, violence, and pure visual mayhem! Extremely bizarre and shocking!

Part of the joy of going to a film festival is discovering movies you wouldn't otherwise check out. It's as much about the atmosphere as it is the product in a lot of cases. Sometimes the films rock, other times they're torture. But when you're seeing a bunch of stuff back-to-back, a mood and appreciation emerges. The mood is like a beat that you hum along to, it's about comfort. The appreciation is for the work that goes into filmmaking and the diversity of different filmmakers. You also learn to appreciate the good movies when you see a couple crumby ones back-to-back.

Wicked Pixel's compilation The Severed Head Network is like a night out at an experimental film festival, bringing together a diverse body of work that's bound to offend just as many as it delights. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Combining horror, comedy, music, sex, violence and people wearing fuzzy animal costumes (at least the headpiece), this collection of eight shorts has a little bit of everything.

Among my favourites are Sedgewick, an ode to 70s blaxploitation cinema to tell the story of a senile senior. The “deer” in the bush is a particularly funny bit. Liontown is another interesting short as it's a musical about bored animals heading to a city of lions, which is where the action's at. It's also where the wild things are. The result is a surreal and a little bit silly delve into horror as you might expect from the one-hit-wonders The Bloodhound Gang.

Tommy Biondo's Satisfaction takes an avant garde look at the emotional effects of rape. It's pretty racy and borders on porn but it still does an affective job at getting to an emotional core.

I had to watch a couple of the remaining films a couple of times in order to try to make some sense out of them. I concluded Vomire is just plain odd. How else could you connect cow guts, unicorns and psychedelic effects.

What annoyed me most about this DVD is the bizarre menu sequence. A short plays out but there's no indication of how to access the rest of the film's content. Needless to say, when my wife walked in to a looping scene of a nude woman walking down the stairs over and over again, there was a little explaining to do. I spent a good half hour trying to figure the darned thing out before I realized you had to press the down button on the remote. Although I admire the different menu, a note inside the case would have been most appreciative.

Video: How's it look?
Each of the films are shown in their original full screen format. The quality varies greatly from film to film, but that's really part of the overall experience.

Audio: How's it sound?
Audio is in Dolby stereo. Like the visuals, the quality does vary from the excellent to the hard to hear. There isn't a ton of dialogue on a whole so it isn't a huge issue.

Extras: What additional goodies are included?

• Opening title sequences for Volume 1 and Volume 2.
• Behind the scenes featurettes for Faith in Nothing, Satisfaction and the two opening title sequences.
• Behind the scenes still galleries for Curveball: Pile of Junk, Faith in Nothing and Victim.
• Trailers for Scrapbook, Ice From the Sun, Savage Harvest, Savage Harvest II and Deadwood Park.
• Gallery of Abstraction contains a series of odd and abstract imagery.

Closing Thoughts
Overall, The Severed Head Network shows a strong commitment to visuals and pushing the expectations of filmmaking. They are experimental so the very core ideal might not be so much in making the greatest film in the history of moving pictures but rather for a filmmaker to push themselves in their craft.


Review brought to you by our friend Ryan @ Movie-Views.com