Death in the Bathroom: Motivational Growth (2013) + Memory Lane (2013)

November 15, 2015 | By Mark R. Hasan

I had to take a short pause from reviewing to get a fine cut completed of my short film, BSV 1172, which is 99% done, now that a concluding sequence has been plotted, filmed, realized, and edited. After some final tweaking, sound design is next, and then submitting the experimental short to select festivals (and hopefully not breaking the bank with costly U.S. dollar fees).

(I’ll blather more on the final stages of post-production in the coming week at Big Head Amusements, with maybe a few stills showing the improbable wiring and vintage gear used to create unique layers of feedback and distortion that was often bounced between Adobe Premiere, S-VHS, and Premiere again. I’ve very glad I swung by Active Surplus during their closing-out sale in September, grabbing coax and UHF adapters, but I hope they come back in another centrally located shop. When you’re working with literal antiques, having the right cables and adapters is vital to success.)

The first set of reviews posted this week is a pair of disparate tales of death in the bathroom (or rather suicide attempts in the loo), with polar approaches to both death, and what happens when its practitioners fail to reach their intended goals.

Don Thacker’s extremely odd black comedy is a gross, sometimes gory, often demented take of schlub who wants to die, clumsily fails, and finds himself being rehabilitated by a manipulative hunk of talking mold, as voiced by the inimitable Jeffrey Combs. Branded Motivational Growth (2013), Parade Deck Films / MVD Visual have assembled a nice special edition on Blu.

Also available from MVD on DVD is Memory Lane (2012), an equally ambitious drama by Shawn Holmes in which a war vet suffering from PTSD revisits death when his suicide attempt implants doubts as to whether his former girlfriend was murdered. It’s an unconventional tale told in a somewhat complicated fashion, and features a less linear structure which has its share of challenges. The disc is similarly loaded with special features, including a director’s commentary and assorted making-of featurettes.