Ugly Bunny :: SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board

I'm always a fan of weird women who don't quite add up, and you have an intriguing lead here in bella, who doesn't act like one would expect. there's a nice contrast between her ritzy lifestyle and her hobby, which is stealing stuffed animals from kids and using them for storing her old cigarettes lol. what makes her work is there's a streak of intense loneliness to both sides of her -- like one half of her personality fuels the other, and vice versa. yet both the money and the evil rituals leave this hollowness that she can't fill and that drives her to get crazier and crazier.

your writing is descriptive but I think it's a little too much (and that's coming from me). people are gonna give you grief for the unfilmables so I won't harp on that. my thing with that is unfilmables can work if they add something beyond pure exposition, but I feel like some of the detail in your action lines is more on the expository side. I think we get a pretty good feel for what bella is like based on how she acts and we don't really need to know she ran track, for instance. and when the creature appears and you tell us it's the one that wreaked havoc o.s. previously -- I think we can already infer this.

the problem with the descriptiveness is it makes this appear to be a heftier short than it is. I don't really see this running at 8 full minutes -- and it might work best as something shorter, anyway, unless you beefed up the actual scenes and gave us a little more. the idea is definitely intriguing and I think bella would be pretty memorable on screen, so I think it's definitely worth doing as much as you can with the idea. I feel like it ends right as things get the most interesting -- now she has what she wants, or so she thinks, but we know it's going to go disastrously. I'd like to see *that* movie.

the satanic stuff is pretty silly and while you include some good grimy stuff -- like the finger getting cut off -- I think the conventional "evil ritual" thing is kinda silly and might detract from the disturbing nature of the rest of it. it feels like the big element that isn't really fleshed out and given an identity of its own here. it's stuff we've seen before in other movies. I would've preferred something more character-driven, because you set up a cool character but then kinda get lost in all the fog machine/flashing lights/glowing pentagram type stuff.

it's a cool effort nonetheless and I'd like to see this on the screen. I always like when writers set out to be unique and you definitely did that there. good work !