Frank DanCoolo: Paranormal Drug Dealer

I loved this. I still watch it online several times a year. Holly Malone, Girl Reporter, is out to find and interview the legendary Frank Dancoolo, Paranormal Drug Dealer. Filled with hilarious one liners, this short jumps off the screen at you in just under seven minutes and is a non-stop ride in how shorts should be made. When it ends, you will wish it could go on and on.

In Neo-Mega-Ultra-Tokyo, Frank Dancoolo is selling dangerous paranormal drugs made from his own spinal fluid. Clearly labeled "Please trip responsibly", some customers go beyond the warning labels and end up dead. Enter Holly Malone, looking for answers to the string of unexplained deaths using her reporter's intuition and a street smart taste test. When she finds Dancoolo, all is not as it would seem. Will she score the Story of the Millennium?

The girl playing Holly is spot on perfect, hammering her lines like Katherine Hepburn on speed. The crisp, clean direction wastes not a second of film time while the other two actors play off her with the right amount of boredom and genuine lust for life.

Don't miss this one.

This movie made absolutely no sense by itself.

However...

If you watch this movie while listening to the Beatles 'Revolution 9', then you're viewing experience will be greatly enhanced. The length of both 9 and the movie are roughly the same, and the more active parts of 9 line up precisely with the more exciting parts of the movie. Both the movie and the song makes my brain feel like it's about to melt, but if the two are simultaneously played together, then not only does the movie AND the song make sense, but you actually experience a rather beautiful piece of art.

In the future world of Neo-Mega-Ultra Tokyo, fast-talking 1950's style journalist Holly Malone is on the trail of a murder and the trail is leading her directly to the infamous lair of paranormal drug dealer Frank DanCoolo. When she confronts DanCoolo looking for the truth, she may find more than she expected.

This film is really hard to describe. It plays out like a hyper blend of His Girl Friday / screwball style delivery with a world of alien-fueled drugs and excess. At times it nails it perfectly and it is really funny and the intense (but senseless) energy really comes together and makes it work. However at other times the excess went too far and crossed line to be more silly than funny – so Holly tasting excrement for one, or the sudden use of the f-word both felt like moments a child would write to try and be shocking. I was ready to hate the film at these point but yet mostly the film pays off the bet of going "all in" on the excessive style it has banked on.

A big part of it is the delivery; McEver really nails Holly and the camera matches her screwball delivery with fast movement. The cool design and sense of excess is everywhere and mostly it works, while Hah and Meyer also deliver well. The script is nonsense and if you don't get it then you will totally hate this short, but for me it just about did enough well to justify how it did it – although I would have liked a few more awkward silences in there (the moment where we see Holly's view of Frank's epic battle is very funny for example).