12 Kilometers

Mike Peccis 12KM is an atmospheric spookfest that harkens back to the days of showing less and telling more, and man is it spooky. I don;t know what it is that;s 12km's down that hole but it scared the hell out of me. The story and acting are amazing and the cinematography is beautiful, reminiscent of The Thing and Stalker. This short film is a must see and I'm hoping hollywood takes notice. 9\10

Ok it might not be up to the standards of a "normal" horror movie which plays at your instinctual fear like a jump scare or some gory sequences. But Mike here is playing at something else. The fear of being a disappointment, claustrophobia, anxiety and failure. What I mean by that is, if you took a 12 year old for instance and showed him/her this movie, they would make a remark along the lines of "I've seen worse" or "too short". On the other hand if we took another person with a pretty decent life experience.. they would be recalled of some of the worse things in they've went through, at least that was the case with me. It might not be something that'll keep me up at night but as the title said it did make my skin crawl for the 26 minutes of screen time. Mike does a really good job of keeping one's eyes on the screen here.

I feel I have not seen enough Russian language movies, but with a horror edge to it, this was really engaging all the way to the end. By the time I was finished, i was completely sucked in and wanted to know how the rest of the story plays out. Sadly this is only a short a this stage, but I would be very intrigued to watch the feature length version!

The sound design was very effective to allow that sense of disorientation of what was occuring, and married up well with the implementation of body horror towards the end. However, there is a slight drawback with that, as it wasn't entirely clear if what I was hearing (as the characters were) was part of the soundtrack or diagetic sound in line with the narrative.

Promising work from the director Mike Pecci, and glad I got the opportunity to watch this. Just left me wanting more, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

First off, the marketing was amazing. I am not big on short films but this was perfect. No fluff. Lite backstory...really wild. Usually a movie is 50% Bs and this jumped right into it. The visuals were crazy. The fact that is was in subtitles and the character sounded and spoke a foreign Eastern Block language....it gave me the feel that it was some backwoods griming Russian basement which was very wild. The filmmaker sucked me right in and I couldn't wait to see what the heck was going on. Not only that but the way you had to search and hear from the filmmaker to watch the movie was really cool. I feel like I am invested. I really enjoyed it.

I agree with alot of the reviews around what was done so well in this film so I would like to critise constructively as all my love for this film is highlighted by others.

The sound design and sound track at the beginning was very clear and loud at times which distracted me. Alot of the film I thought would be executed better if more of it was silent. Mostly I was not sure if what I was hearing was soundtrack or diegetic sound effects and part of the narrative.

The protagonist was unclear as I had impressions that the man we followed until the end was the antogonist. With a farely confusing but beautiful finish.

The cutaways by the microscopic photographer were beautiful with a War of the Worlds feel however I felt there was too many and got distracted.

I love the auteur feel you have to your films and the film sucessfully carries out an aesthetic and mood to it.