Good as Dead by Will J. Wheeler - Short, Horror - A tortured woman wakes up in the boot of a car - bruised, beaten and looking like death. Will she get her revenge? 7 pages - pdf, format 8)

Consider your script Good as dead, Good as read.

This had a really nice plot that kept me glued to the story. Having a woman stuck in car boot is great place to start and is a very sharp hook to hook your reader.

The end and the big revelation is far fetched and over the top. But hey I dig that sort of stuff and it always finds its way into my writing so I had no problem with it. But I wonder if others here will.

Now the one thing I didn't like was your over writing of your descriptions. You don't have to write every detail of bruise and cut on Dale body. She beat up and we get the picture. It just makes a script longer then it needs to be and slows down the whole reading experience.

Script read is all about fast read. You're not reading a novel.  

Thanks for the reply, tonkatough. I've taken everything you've said on board.

Just a few notes on the script.

I wrote this about 2 years ago, when I first started getting interested in filmmaking. I really had no idea about formatting - I learned everything from various webistes and wrote   the thing in Celtx. I'd never read a script. Before I made the revisions and decided to post it up for fun, the whole thing was basically giant chunks of description with dialogue in between. I went through and made a lot of breaks in the action, omitted a few things, and then threw it on to SimplyScripts. So, in summary, I apologise for the amatuerish purple descriptions, but hey - gotta start somewhere, right?

All comments and criticisms greatly appreciated. Read for read if you've got something online.

Cheers and stay classy.

Hello Will,

Interesting script, I liked the idea and how it was all set up and the ending too.

Just felt your descriptions and grammar let you down.  I agree with Glenn on this where you can cut back and make this a faster read.

I also was curious how the woman and man didn't hear Dale?

You should name the woman and man too.

You've wrote alot of words in capitals.  This is unnecessary and off putting.  It's like every other word is in capitals.

I am curious why you posted this script without giving it a rewrite.  If this is two years old and now your scripts probably look different nowadays, why not fix this?  Is this your one and only script or did you continue to write scripts?

All the best,


Javier

Will

I light of what you said about this being your first script, one can forgive the grammar, spelling, tenses and technical mistakes as there are quite a few of them here. Presuming you've learned a lot since I won't dwell on them, instead I'll focus on your actual story.

I'll comment as I read.

"The car sits in what looks like during the day would be a busy CAR PARKING LOT."

-- How could we possibly know this?? I'd suggest leaving it out. Just say "The car sits in a large/small empty parking lot."

I was immediately drawn in by the fact that we meet the proprietor of the car so early and see him seemingly normal talking and chatting with a girl.

Would Dale not have shouted out when she heard them approaching? How would she have known that the man was the owner of it until he opened the door? There was a reasonable amount of time between hearing them talk and they reaching the car.

Regardless of that I thought she would have shouted anyway, maybe the girl is an innocent in all this. Dale has nothing to lose anyway considering her current position.

The scenes with Dale in the boot listening to the muffled chatter of her captor and presumably his latest victim go through the inane post movie small talk have great potential. Good suspense could be built up in these sequences.

Although one has to ask why would he take the risk of bringing another girl back to the car when he already has someone in the boot? Its like he's tempting fate or just being plain stupid.

"DALE hears the woman walking away and knows she is left
alone. She starts breathing and crying ERRATICALLY and then
begins ROUGHLY slamming her feet into the roof of the boot."

Why, oh why, didn't she do this earlier? Like when the woman might actually hear it, instead of waiting till she had gone inside her house.

Ok not  a bad twist here, seems like a very complicated way to go about things but it held my interest till the end. By the man's reaction to Dale in the boot I got teh impression it wasn't his doing.

The guy that did beat up Dale (or at least led to believe in the end) How did he know that the man was gonna get into that specific car, does he know him, do they share it?

Not a bad job, I'd love to see a newer, cleaner draft incorporating what you've picked up in the two years since you penned this. It shows some good potential as it stands.

Cheers

Col.