Cracked-Face vs. An Unknown Serial Killer by Swarnanko Chakraborty


Two serial killers engage in battle deep in the remote forest.

Frankly, efforts like this are incredibly hard to review. The idea of being an interstitial piece bridging two works together in short-form like this is a challenge more than anything else I cover on the site, and that comes into play here where this piece carries over the work of the killer from the studios' previous entry Afriti and his battle with a new serial killer in a remote forest.


With most of the short taking up the new killers' disposal of a victim by burying him in the undergrowth of the jungle before encountering the revived killer, this makes fine use of the methodical manner he gets the body buried in the underbrush which manages the effective atmosphere of the jungle quite well. The appearance of the Afriti killer, an effective shot of him appearing over the shoulder looking up from a pit below, leads into a strong chase scene between the forest as the two trade blows with each getting the upperhand. The hand-to-hand brawl between the two is utterly laughable with the participants holding back visibly so it looks like them stumbling around in a badly choreographed fashion, but this is understandable given the budget limitations of the project. However, it just ends right afterwards which really does highlight the problems of reviewing such scenes in this format.


In the end, where does that leave us? Can this work as a prologue to another project? Certainly, it's a competent scene in almost every respect and gives plenty of hints as to what can come from here given the idea of the stream-of-conscious style filmmaking. As a stand-alone short feature? It's maddeningly inconsistent being a dialog-free narrative about two figures battling in the woods which looks like it was filmed over the weekend by a minimal crew and offers an open-ended framework designed to lead into another feature which can make for an unnecessary watch. This works the way it is, but it definitely needs more to make a better context.

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