Warehouse by Chris Rhives (I Swear I'm Not Sane Like You) - Short - A mother kidnaps and tortures the man she beleives guilty in the death of her daughter.  13 pages - html, format 8)

Hey Chris,
I must admit I didn’t like this one. I thought the writing was messy (I’ll get to that later) and the general premise of the story and its setup was not good IMO.

This is a revenge story and I thought the biggest problem was that I never felt Linda’s pain. She seemed very robot’ish. The officers tell her that her daughter has been killed and the only way you describe her feelings is that you made her cry.

I would imagine that someone who is about to kidnap, torture and kill another human being, must go through a wide range of emotions.

You should have told us Amanda’s age much sooner. It was difficult to relate to her.

I don’t understand why you had the scene with officers in the car. What was the point of that scene. It didn’t drive the story forward. You should have opened on Linda and then have the officers knock on her door.

By the way, officers are not assigned to cases, they don’t inform relatives about dead family members - detectives do that, detectives are assigned to cases.

I thought the dialog in that scene was terrible. “Our best guess is she wandered out at night and someone must of picked her up”. Really? How did they come to that conclusion? They hadn’t questioned the mother at that point - not that they question her at all for that matter.

“We had one lead. The hiker who found her. A David Graves”. I don’t think the police gives out names of suspects to the victims family - especially if they have cleared him already.

And that leads us to the really big questions? How did Linda find him, how did she manage to kidnap him? You never answer these questions and it makes the whole story unbelievable.

The whole torture scene in the warehouse reminds me an awful lot of the scene in Reservoir dogs, so you get no points of originality here. And by the way, how does she find a warehouse? Why does she film the whole thing? It doesn’t make any sense what so ever.

“A new lead in the Amanda Carr case seems to indicate certain guilt for an Richard Beck”. First of all, the police doesn’t usually release the names of suspects to the press.

I was glad when she shot herself. It brought this not very well written script to an end.

Iro. the writing, lose the “WEs” they have no place in a spec script. The same goes for transitions. Try to keep the script as less technical as you can. Why did you need the POV in the squad car in the beginning?

Your character descriptions need to be a lot better. All you characters come across very wooden.

Try to use active verbs instead of is/are, it works much better that way. It keeps the scenes moving.

Also, proofread your work. This was a Typo fest. And why does the title in the script say “Untitled Captive Drama” and not Warehouse?

This needs a lot of work.

Rob

I read this because the logline is very similar to a short I'm working on, though very differently executed.

I think the main problem here is the fact that Amanda is reduced to a prop that sets things in motion, but because she's never a character in the story, we don't really care if she's avenged or not. Like Rob said, I don't feel Linda's pain. I was kinda pissed at her for what she did for the most part.

It's kinda difficult for me to give specific suggestions to the story because I'll end up suggesting you write the short I'm working on haha.

The "how did Linda manage to kidnap David" aspect didn't bother me that much though, I suppose a grieving mother can be quite resourceful.

I did see the ending coming though, and I feel David caved in too quickly. The newscast at the end sounded unbelievable, and I'd change Linda's hysterical laughter part. that was cheesy.

Yeah, it's not one of my better ones. I just wanted to post it to compare it to the one that was made.

I liked the idea as a whole, just thought it could be more focused.  the scene with the officers as the "messengers" was a cool idea.
you missed a whole bunch of typo's, some are things that spell check won't pick up like "of" instead of "or" on page 2, etc.
I'd try to condense a lot of the scenes, too much dialogue. Try getting into the scene and leaving it early, you could take away at least something unneccessary from each scene and still convey the same info.
It might help to find a less obvious way of introducing and referring to Linda...when you state we haven't seen her face its a dead giveaway.
Your action scenes between Linda and david were well done, lots of tension.