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A Taste Of Hell by Dante on the beach - Short, Horror - When all the planets in the solar system align with the sun, the Earth is briefly transported into another dimension. As it does, a father playing on the beach and his daughter gets to experience their own personal hell. - pdf format
You met the brief! Congrats there, there was some heat and some suspense, a big tick.
Right, the rest of it. Sorry to say but it was littered with typos, especially the first page, and quite a lot of repetitions of words. It's a really odd criticism I know, but when you read something you subconsciously get into a rhythm, and whilst it's not poetry, to see the same words in back to back sentences does throw the mind off. Just drag the thesaurus out and you'll be fine. Also, lose page 5, a bit sloppy.
The story was nuts, absolutely bonkers. Loved the man's struggle against the crabs, which weirdly turned into ghost crabs for some reason, but it really was absolutely crazy.
I certainly didn't hate it but it does need work. A good scan for typos, make it flow better with some re-wording and I'm sure some people will dig the story. Not really for me but alright none the less.
What's with so many Title pages being so off center? Just a bad way to start...but then again, with a logline like you have here, I'm not sure if this is even supposed to be taken seriously. Let's see what we have here.
With a lead character named Jeff, you'd think this would be winner, but alas, as I presumed, it's a pisser, and just too dumb for me to enjoy right now.
Haven't read the other reviews yet so pardon if I repeat others.
- Lay on the earthshine beach... Eh? Odd.
- Jeff is not capitalized when introduced. He's tanned and athletic yet buried to his neck in sand.
This is starting off with a lot of unecessary detail, including names. We'll never know unless they're wearing name tags. A father and daughter. How do we know that he had a revelation that life can start after forty?
The story is kinda cool but a bit too bizarre. Rose is suddenly buried to her neck? I'm starting to think this is all a dream.
Not a dream...just really weird. With some work, it could work. Make it all a dream and it could work. IDK. Good effort!
I will give you this - the image of a father and daughter buried in the sand up to their necks while the tide rolls in is spine tingling. Would like to see that concept woven into a better story.
I see what you are going for with the story but what happened to your formatting? Weird title page and an extra page at the end. It's like your final draft got possessed lol.
Anyway this one is imaginative for sure but it needs more of a setup for people to get what is going on.
-Mark
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This was imaginative. Not sure what to make of it really, if there was any unifying theme to it. You open with this perfect sunny day and Jeff totally at peace with the world... then by the end "nothing will ever be the same"... so maybe something about how fragile life is, how fleeting happiness can be?
Tonally, it didn't quite gel. Some of the descriptions seemed to be veering into comedy... like the big-bad wolf and the Mexican standoff lines... not sure that was intentional. I do think this could potentially work as a dark comedy. When it did go very dark at the end with the father and daughter drowning that was pretty intense.
Hate to sound like a broken record, as I just read a script I had no idea what happened, but... I have no idea what happened. I thought the earth was hurtling into space or something, but what transpired was just plain old strange and didn't make much sense to me. Sorry, not for me.
Be very careful with your editing. A script with a typo ("lay" instead of "laying") right at the start would very likely be rejected by a busy reader. Sound cues like "squawk" should be capitalized. At the start of para. 5 use "Rose" not "her" to make it easier for the reader. "A gust of air that would impress the big bad wolf" for me is not screenwriting. Just tell us what we can see: "A powerful jet of air" (or something like that). Ghost crab? Could you visualize for us? Once the scene is back to normal after the alignment ends, why would the fairground music be out of key? It's just a recording, probably, so how could it be out of key? Heat isn't really an influential factor here, is it? Watch for ways to take out some words. For example, could "The water that splashes Jeff is less than gentle' become something like "A wave hammers Jeff." This is creative. I feel like a little more character development would take it to the next level. Right now it feels like some weird stuff happens, but I have no real reason to care about the characters and how they are changed. Keep going! Nice draft.
Hmm A planetary alignment of that magnitude would be known years ahead so people would be ready and waiting for it.
The writer here is going for a spiritual thing here but parts of it work as Dave alluded too.
The weather is kind of impacting I guess - more so than in the majority of entries lol - but the non dialogue is so-so; Jeff and Rosie would be yelling to each other when they were buried
The writing was pretty good as I could picture it nicely just needs a tweak