Medicare Nightmare by A Member - Short, Horror - Old ladies with osteoporosis attack a hospital because they cannot afford their medical bills.  The only way to stop them is to hold out the night until the milk truck arrives in the morning so they can give milk to heal the old ladies' bones. 7 pages     A October '06 One Week Challenge entry - rtf, format 8)

I can get what you are going for here -- a kind of zombie bloodbath -- except with old ladies.  It's weird, and I am not sure if it would play out as comic or so patently offensive that people would picket the theater.

Points for trying something different.  I would say that your logline gives away too much of the story.  Personally, I found the ending a little disappointing, but that one is just my opinion.

This is one of the first where I find myself genuinely curious as to who the author might be.

This one, although comical, needed more humor-- just a few tweaks here and there.

A fun read,

Seth

Yes!!!! This one was perfect for me! You combined the two ultimate creepy things together: Zombies and old ladies. It was sort of a Dawn of the Dead feeling, but instead being locked up in a hospital.

This one was funny, and really not that much horror, but the comedy takes over and turns this out to be a good script. It amused me, and that is what matters. I never really saw a script that had paragraphs with numbers. For instance:

1. So-and-So runs down the hallway.

2. So-and-So beats up an old lady while What's-His-Face squashes a woman's arm.

But this was fun nevertheless.

Sean

Hey.

FUnny, definetely not horror, but it was funny.  And it involved milk.  SO wooo!

It was hilarious though, I got a sort od South Park feel from it. and the doctor delivered some hilarious lines, so I guess in the end this was a pretty good read.

-Tyler

Amusing. Not horror, but got me to smile at parts. A good parody of the Dawn of the Dead-esque types of horror movies. Poked fun at a lot of cliches. And any script that massacres a bunch of old ladys is alright with me.

Very solid read. It flowed and kept me reading. Isn't it amazing what creativity lies in the human mind. If I could find one thing that didn't quite jell... it would be the dialogue. Seemed a bit ducka ducka. Here is an example.

KYLE
Shit!  This does not look good.  Everyone into the back room.

I would have given it more power. Like...

Holy shit! Them medicare bitches look evil. Move... Everyone into the back room for we get clobbered by a buncha blue hair bags.

Just a thought. Great job!

Spencer "For Hire" McDonald

WTF was that! I hope the writer of this won't never becomes Healthy Secretary! For God sake...I mean sick! Anyway, very well written; fast reading and it is good. This reminds me 50ths low budget movies in black white played by Rod Cameron and Honda Fleming screened on mondays in my father's theater!

****SPOILERS****

Well, I knew from the logline not to take it seriously. Unfortunately, I didn’t find it all that funny either. I smiled a couple of times and let out a small laugh once. Ultimately, I just don’t find chainsawing old ladies in the face to be all that amusing.

Lauren Michaels? It’s a different spelling but I thought of Saturday Night Live right away. I don’t know if this was some sort of homage or not.

I felt like you were going for South Park style humor but it didn’t quite work for me. The concept of parodying zombie films with elderly women who need medical treatment was novel but the concept really doesn’t have anywhere to go as evidenced by the script. You seemed to have trouble ending it. Sort of like with skit comedy. Sometimes the endings are kind of awkward. This one was too.

Brea

Anyone fed up with old ladies should get a charge out of this. Otherwise...I don't know. At least it's different.

This was different. It would have been nice to see a political figure running for his life in this script. LOL
There were some shocks, but it also had me grinning.
Good job on the challenge.

Cindy

That was absolutely hilarious, definitely my favorite entry so far. But then, who doesn’t like needlessly slaughtering old women?

Descriptions were fine, although it got sort of weird during the battle. Shouldn’t really have those numbers in there. Dialogue was great, especially the Doctor and his comments.

My only issue was trying to determine whether this was really horror or not. Either way, job well done.

-Zavier

Eh.  I like shock humor but slaughtering old women doesn't go particularly far for me.  Not six pages, anyway.  The script had a nice mood to it but in the end it felt like a bit of a waste of time.  

Wasn't badly written though, and great choice of bizarre circumstances.  The concept is hilarious to me.  It's just that old women's arms breaking and men slaughtering old women isn't.

This is the first one I read and I thought it was hilarious.  Well done.

SPOILER

Upon reading it a second time, I found the doctor’s alarmist attitude towards the situation with the old ladies (which lead to excessive/unnecessarily violent methods of dispatching them), to be even funnier since we know that the old ladies mean no physical harm.  Maybe find some way of revealing the intentions of the old ladies (or lack thereof), to the audience just a hair before revealing it to the doctor?  Thus making some of his actions (i.e. “he RAMS his chainsaw into the face of an old lady”) seem even more excessive and absurd?  

This is my first post ever, and I’m very much a newbie in the field of screenwriting, so there is a good chance you’re better off ignoring what I say!  

Thanks for the good read.

Thank God I have Medicare!

As mentioned before, this seemed like a lost episode of "South Park"

While funny it didn't seem scary at all.  Well, unless you find old people scary I suppose.  :P

Still though a fun (if weird) read that I enjoyed!

This one was pretty darn crazy and it whacked a few funny bones along the way.

But I thought you could have taken it even further.

I would like to have seen these old ladies as a serious (ha ha)  threats.  I picture an army of grannies charging ahead, the ones in the front smashing doors and breaking arms.  They fall by the wayside and the next tier of maniac grandmas take their place. And so on.

And I wanted to see Kyle or Chad with dentures planted on their bodies. I wanted to bruise marks from swinging canes and walkers and what have you.

It would have been funny to see Dr. Jones and his chain saw squaring off with Granny Smith and her wooden crutches.

What if the story is not so much about Medicare, but the impact of cutbacks on the availability of milk?

I thought for sure that poor pregnant woman was in for the worse. Why she’s a lactating machine… Eeeeeegad.

The usage of Numbers in the middle pages was unnecessary.  I thought it was for a montage, but the more I read the less I think that was your intention.

Avoid phrasing like “Suddenly there’s a bang,” “The old ladies are chanting,” “… all begin heading toward the back room,” “the mob begins to slowly shuffle,” “Lauren tries desperately to get up, but to no avail, “… she becomes surrounded by old ladies…”

Lots of passive action and/or redundancy.

The story was a bit cockeyed and I didn’t quite get the humor. But you did okay in pumping energy into scenes and you score points for originality.

I wasn’t big on the ending.  It seemed brittle and there is a certain meanness to having all these old ladies suffering, from start to finish.

Hey everyone, thanks for the feedback.

And yes the numbers were for a montage...I guess that was bad advice from a friend.

As you can tell I couldn't think of anyway to make milk scary (though now upon reading some others I regret that thought).  The idea is loosely based off that of a friend's, whom as it turns out is a huge South Park fan.  

Anyway the ending was rushed because I found out about the competition on Wednesday in passing by and decided to do it Thursday night.  I did not plan anything out for it so the ending just kind of got improvised as I wrote it.

I guess the majority of it could have been better (It never even occurred to me that Lauren, being pregnant, would have milk), but I just felt the only way to make it work would be to make it over the top.

Thanks for reading.
-Pat

PS: The Lauren Michaels thing had no reference to SNL, but was just a random name that I picked.

Brandnew,

I'm really sorry to have to tell you that this script didn't really work for me at all. I guess you've got the younger crowd liking it so that's good though.

This starts out as some kind of political/social statement about medicare and then it turns into a "kill all the old ladies" kind of thing. I think I can see what you were aiming for, but the fact that the old and "inocent looking" old ladies with their bones breaking all the time turn out to be nice, means IMHO that they do not work as antagonists. Having them all get killed makes the MEN in fact the bad guys and I don't think that's what you had in mind. The MEN were in no way heroes for doing what they did even if you were creative with the various ways of killing the ladies. The old ladies were the victims here, they did not deserve what they got.

I'll end on a good note though and tell you that this was written well.
:)

Thanks for the comment Donna.

Actually I do kind of set up the men to be the bad guys in this script as the old ladies are meant to be innocent victims.

I'm sorry you did not like it too much, but thank you for reading it and giving your opinion.  It is very well appreciated.

Well, for a horror script, that was actually rather amusing. I picture an elaborate Saturday Night Live-ish sketch or something. It feel like a spoof of zombie films.

For seven pages, it feels fairly complete to me. This genre doesn't lend itself much to character development, and with everyone you have in this script, it would be near impossible to go beyond name and stereotype.

I did find myself feeling a bit sorry for the old ladies. They're brittle and being easily beaten by the heroes of the story. It would have helped if we actually saw someone being killed by them. Granted, it would go against your ending, but it would have made killing and maiming them easier to accept.

It's decent from a story perspective, but has some problems from a taste angle that I don't think can be fixed without ruining the concept.

EDIT: After looking at some prior comments (I always comment first and then look over what's gone before) I find it amusing that I missed the Lorne Michaels (unintentional) reference, and still referred to SNL.