Fun Guy by Mark Renshaw (markrenshaw) writing as Fungas McFungi - Short, Horror - A research laboratory assistant who uses humour to mask a lifetime of abuse and pain snaps and decides to kickstart the zombie apocalypse. - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

"It may sound blasphemous to some people, but I truly believe what Todd Philips and Scott Silver achieved in 122 minutes of Joker, the writer of this script has managed to achieve in less than 8 minutes."

- Analyst: KHDMLE

Okay, certainly meets the challenge parameters.  So, basically the tale of a dude from birth forward suffering all sorts of social dysfunction ultimately ending up in him turning himself into some sort of heidous creature.

While the writing is pretty solid here, the thread of the story was lost on me a bit, I mean, I understand it – I just didn’t quite link up how his final action served any purpose – no vengeance taken, no punishment doled out for all of his abuse – just self-damage.

At one point I thought that you would connect the Antennae (using it is a TV antenna) to his disdain for the shows he was watching – but that didn’t track ultimately.

Long-winded way of saying that the horrific events of his early life could have led to any horrific finale – I would have liked a stronger connection to the fate that he chose. Hope that makes sense.

Has she finally flown over the cuckoo’s nest?

Kind of a mature line for a 10 year old.

Fungal Zombies! This made me think of The Last of Us and maybe that's how the whole zombie apocalypse in that game started, with just one guy who's been abused and never fought back his entire life snapping and taking the world with him?

The reverse narrative puts a different spin on this. We know the end in the first scene and then learn how and why.

Well done for entering, this challenge was tough and the entries I've read so far have been impressive.

Q: Why was the mushroom the life of the party?
A: Because he was a Fungi.

Love me a good dad joke, lol.

This was pretty much a story told in reverse, not a bad thing per se and it fits the theme re: experimental narrative, but linear - forward or reverse - is still one-dimensional and linear, lest there was a break in the stream somewhere that I inadvertently scanned over.

That being said, this was loaded with eye candy for a sci-fi buff like me, lots of choice words and action blocks that made it a rib-steak juicy read… ok, that sounded weird. Let’s go with entertaining.

Kick-starting a zombie apocalypse by spreading the disease, so to speak, or the fungus spores via some ominous and disturbing alien-spore-sack on Guy’s skull is a curiously unique approach, but then again, this Guy’s head is full of a shit grown virus, err fungus.

Okay, so… I know why Guy lost his mind; the world, the people in his life, continually harvested him like a mushroom, by keeping him in the dark and feeding him shit all the live long day.

WIFE: Give me one good reason why I should stay?
GUY: My Costco card?

Another suggestion: “My Sam’s Club Card… actually, you don’t even need the card, you can just give them your phone number.”

Other than that, I liked this, it was off the wall fun(gi), best of luck.

This got progressively more interesting for me as it went along. Maybe that's because I'm just not a big fan of Zombies, and the further we got from them, the more interested I became.

I kid. Partly.

Interesting choice to tell it straight backwards, all the way to his early childhood. That was a highlight. Yes, it was very linear in its way. But, thematically, it made the point: everything in this poor Guy's life led to his big break.

I used to be married to a zombie. And that's not just some "ex" joke. He really was a zombie.

I liked this, zombie movies are always welcome in my house. This was simple,  and it works...

But...

Gotta confess, I was kinda "eh" with this overall, I wanted to love it but fact is, I've probably read too many zombie script excerpts, and hoped for something a little different, sure...the beginning was the end but... maybe that's my problem, not yours. Best of Irish luck! :)

Haha! Great title for a movie, A:

I married a Zombie.

Btw, coming back to review this...

Writer,

The premise is great, I love the first bit of this with Fun Guy Zombie. I thought maybe you'd jump from what the zombie Guy is interacting with in the present to the same spots in the past as his non zombie self, build the narrative that way. There was a missed opportunity there IMO. It was well written and easy to follow, I got a chuckle out of it. Nice work!

I’m gonna weaponize some fungi and
kickstart the zombie apocalypse.
As one does.  ;D

Nice humour throughout.

GUY
Has she finally flown over the
cuckoo’s nest?

This line (above) really needs to be funnier I think, to show he really has a gift with humour.
The Costo card line worked well - more of that.

Should be:
busted lip
conjoined twins

I didn't really understand Mother's obsession with making massive amounts of food - a pot of boiling water for spaghetti would surely do the trick? I think that came across more the way you described it. That said I visualised a food fixation and it was a bit disconnect for me - she's ill, fine, and you're conveying her erratic, chaotic environment. And, she's ironically abusive.

This is the second script where the female character turns into a knife welding maniac against her husband.

This has an eccentric Eraserhead feel to it. Hey, perhaps go all out and give Guy a facial disfurgement which might account for both the bullying and him having to counter with being both the smart and the funny guy.

The non-linear narrative meant we never got to really see what Guy looked like before he transformed himself into a living walking cordycep. But, you could include his physical appearance in the Jock scene.

A stereotypical jock, BRAD walks in, hip-to-hip with KATE,
the girl everyone wants but only hung out with Neanderthals.

Mixing your tenses there. ^
...She only hangs out with Neanderthals.

Anyway, this was entertaining for sure, and Cordyceps are good value.
Would make for a terrific and very out there Hyper Epics Comic episode. Blood and slime make for great visuals.

Very nice job.

P.S. Nice summing up line by Rick:
Okay, so… I know why Guy lost his mind; the world, the people in his life, continually harvested him like a mushroom, by keeping him in the dark and feeding him shit all the live long day.  ;D

Hi writer

Quoted Text MOTHER He is special. He�s going to change the world one day. I just know it!

Nice final line.

Yeah, I enjoyed this, we start with him ending the world and go back to discover why. From a young age he was mentally ruined which has a knock-on effect for his entire life. (I once knew a guy who, aged 10, saw his father kill his mother and then kill himself - He was 34 when I met him but mentally remained a 10-year-old)

Nice work

Joker on mushrooms!

I liked the idea, but I wish you had focused on mushroom Guy's reign of terror a bit more. Or at least have his "horror" story run parallel to his backstory rather than have it all at the beginning.

Nice job.

Someone is a "The Last of Us" fan. :)

I enjoyed this one. A simple zombie origin story told backward. Easy to follow. Wish we got a little more zombie action.

Some of the dialog was a little on the nose, but nothing too bad.

Fun script. Good job. :)

Another abused child grows up to be a monster, the mad-scientist type in this case. The script is solid enough (though the jock attack on Guy is too over the top), but its backward progression is strictly linear, which I think is contrary to the rules of the challenge.

Not sure what a spore looks like, couldn't visualize the opening.

This was a bit of a chore to read, very overwritten. For instance:

Quoted Text A brutal battle ensues. Guy savagely beats a beefy SECURITY GUARD. Any blow the guard manages to land has no effect.

No need to say a brutal battle ensues with a period at the end. Either get to what exactly what we see or keep the sentence going -- A brutal battle ensues: Guy savagely beats... or A brutal battle ensues as Guy savagely beats...

But yeah, the presentation on the page was an eyesore for me, too many bits of description that I couldn't visualize -- how would a regular person know what an ant with a fungal infection looks like?

Despite the overwriting, once we got to some dialogue, I actually started to enjoy the silliness of it all. The dialogue was fun. Not sure if we needed to go back to him at age 18 and then age 10, could've probably done without the flashback to age 18 (though I enjoyed the dialogue in that scene).

Overall, nice job. My main issue was the writing, though it got better as the story progressed

-- Michael

Well if a crazy mother is to blame, my kids will definitely start a zombie apocalypse!!

Interesting idea, to go back and show why Guy would choose to destroy life on earth for everyone. Not sure we need to see so many flashbacks of his early life. But maybe in one of the earlier FB's, show him reading a comic about Zombies or something. Or have him doing mushrooms.

Easy and entertaining read. Nice work.

This is a linear story told in reverse and while there are some dramatic moments leading to Guy's eventual breaking, for me it's not fully explained what the final nail in the coffin was. I did like it but not enough to love it.
Well done.

Though I picked up that this is reverse chronology, I knew what to expect from the challenge parameters. I don't think it'd be immediately obvious to an audience (or uninitiated reader). Maybe having a clock somewhere in frame for the first few scenes will help explain it.

Mostly good job of linking the scenes as effect-then-cause, though the social worker probably should say that Guy is now a ward of the state. As written in this draft, there's nothing about Guy's comment that should strike the social worker as using humor as a coping mechanism, but with less time pressure I'm sure an appropriate wise-crack will find its way into a rewrite.

That one leap-of-logic aside, the story flows well. It also reminds me of the spores that took over a WWII bomber not so long ago.

Good job!

I liked how this ended, or started as per reading it... the idea of the spores and him up on the roof was effective and would be great visually.

But personally thought it went into more melodrama territory as it went backwards into his life.

Good effort

Loved the overall premise but the reverse buildup was somewhat anticlimactic...but I did love the last line. I know peeps are kind of over the whole zombie genre yet this would still succeed if that word was just removed. Good work - needs development.

I like it.  Not a whole lot of impact (for me) but a smooth read - clear and concise with a simple to follow narrative told in reverse order.  Nice use of visuals with the book ending of Guy as an infant to the antenna ending - plus the nod to the worker ant locked onto the leaf.

Maybe could have worked in a little more as to the consequences of Guy’s actions just to foreshadow the horrors he’s about to unleash on the world.  Seeing the Security Guard stumbling zombie-like after him towards the end/beginning might have given you something to that effect.

That was certainly different. I liked a lot of this, wasn't afraid to be weird. It veered from silly to dark a little too much for me. Not that you can't make that work, but I don't think it's quite there yet.

Might be something to the suggestion I saw about having the present run parallel instead of reverse order. Mushroom Guy going on a rampage could be more fun with some kind of context.

Nothing much to add about this. It is as it says on the tin, a story about a guy who snaps after a lifetime of abuse and decides to kill himself but take the world with him in spectacular fashion.

I loved writing this and despite the lacklustre reviews I really do love the premise. I'm definitely going to do another draft and enter it into a few competitions. Thanks for all the advice- I think the consensus has persuaded me to try a mixed narrative with this rather than a reverse one but I'll have a think and beef up the build-up as well as fix some of the awkward writing.

Any further suggestions on how I can make this better are welcome.

New draft is up. I kept it reverse narrative but fleshed it out and generally gave it a polish. I do feel that this is the best thing I've written in ages and I recently won a draw for some free notes from Wescreenplay for any short I wanted to submit. I thought I may as well submit this draft of Fun Guy and see what they say. The report blew me away! The reader gave me such amazing praise and understood every word, nuance and subtext I'd squeezed in which was a breath of fresh air. The quote from the feedback I'm going to requote for the rest of my life is:

"It may sound blasphemous to some, but I truly believe what Todd Philips and Scott Silver achieved in 122 minutes of Joker, the writer of this script has managed to achieve in less than 8 minutes."

I've been on cloud 9 ever since, so I'll certainly be entering this into competitions. Thank you so much for the brilliant feedback and ideas.

Quoted from MarkRenshaw "It may sound blasphemous to some, but I truly believe what Todd Philips and Scott Silver achieved in 122 minutes of Joker, the writer of this script has managed to achieve in less than 8 minutes." I've been on cloud 9 ever since, so I'll certainly be entering this into competitions. Thank you so much for the brilliant feedback and ideas.

Wow, you must be chuffed! That's some high praise indeed.