A Crowbar To The Skull by A Reservoir Dog - A man’s path leads to off-the-charts aggression and peril.  Short, Horror

"A bull pierced by the matador"...niiiice.

We watch Ben fall apart. That first scene is pretty chaotic, then the garden scene is very calm. Good job showing the complete change in Ben and his life.

I feel like the change happens rather abruptly though. Like when he brought that woman into their bedroom. Seemed super extreme and a quick and drastic personality change.

Interesting idea but maybe needs some more work on the tone and how you unravel everything.

Much of the writing is stellar – some really vivid descriptions and the action sequences are really well done. But there are some problems for me..

The (ANOTHER TIME) in the headers didn’t do it for me in terms of getting my bearings straight. As an example – I haven’t a clue if the garden scene took place before or after the affair scene.

And there is a weakness in character threads. For example:

Quoted Text DR. ODOM Phineas Gage was the most famous case involving brain trauma and personality. Do you know that name? She stares. No clue. DR. ODOM He was a foreman on the railway, and his accident was quite gruesome. After that, he wasn't exactly the same..

And – we never hear from Phineas again – so why set up the expectation that we are going to – you don’t need a name here. The Doc merely needs to describe the malady.

AND

Why drop Cisco from the story??? I thought for sure there would be some reference to him as we went backwards – IMO – he needed to be included – we need to know why he met his demise.

This one goes for the tonal change throughout. But there is too much crammed in just 6 pages so, nothing feels intriguing. It's just a series of events happening in a jumbled manner.

The writing is good and easy to read, no doubt about that. But one thing was left unanswered here - What about Cisco? Who is he? Just a guy who messed with Ben? I think it needed an explanation since he is killed and we don't know why.

Good luck.    

Love the title. ;D

Writing itself is uneven. Technically, it's fine. Some really good, visual decriptions. But the action sequences themselves are repetitive and don't have much logic to them. Hard for me to visualize how they play out. :(

The story is unclear to me. Beginning to think this style of storytelling isn't my thing at all. :(

Good effort.

Memento meets Sweeny Todd, and a strange but true tale of that dude who took a crowbar through his skull but lived.

Would Bridget really have stayed with someone this unstable, would anyone? Stranger incidents have been recorded I would imagine, about emotionally abused spouses hanging around, waiting for better days.

Ben dying in and amongst the flowers was a nicer ending than some dark basement somewhere, him ending up back in the garden where he and Bridget sowed happier times, indicating there’s a hint of who he once was lurking in his dour mind, the memories of what could have been rising up to transport him to the ethereal. Not sure what else I could add or take away from this, there’s a million avenues of approach during the writing process, and I think you found a good way, albeit dark, to tell Ben’s tale for this challenge. Best of luck.

Good guy Ben gets a crowbar to the head in a home invasion. He takes steroids to build up his muscles so he can defend himself in the future. Unfortunately, the steroids, coupled with his head injury, change his personality. He becomes a drug dealer and promiscuous. Ben had a rather extreme character arc, but it was handled well, as was the positioning of the scenes.

Excellent writing here and I like how the experimental narrative is used to get across the confusion of head trauma resulting in personality changes. You just try to do so much in 6 pages when it is obvious this story needs more to do it justice. Putting the timeframe in the scene headings is okay but you need to have some mechanism in the scenes to show the audience when this occurs as well. At the moment it is a bit muddled.

Ah, Phineas Gage. Yup, never quite the same after his little puncture wound, eh? Trauma, whether by accident or self-inflicted, has untold effects on the old psyche. I've seen a number of peeps change from exactly that self indulgence. Sad.

Just a nice little gruesome tale of woe. Who was Cisco though? Never really got a backstory on him.

I really enjoyed the writing on this one. For me, it flowed really well.

Oddly, the story lacked. Which, I find kind of confusing. There really is quite a bit packed into this. But, it really boils down to: Man gets hit in head. Bad things happen. Of course, it's unfair to break it down so simply. But, I can't help but feel like all these interesting pieces should have added up to a larger story.

I'd like to provide better notes, as I think this is a bit unfair, but I just can't quite put my finger on why it didn't work for me. I'll come back if something better comes to me.

Love the title.

But I wasn't big on the story or the characters. The flower aspect/garden symbolism felt heavy-handed and overdramatic for me at the end. The writing was pretty good, though it seemed a bit too mechanical during the fight scene on page one -- it felt a little blah, didn't come across as intense as a fight scene should be. The overall story didn't have much of an impact on me. It was a good effort, though.

Hi Writer

Love the idea behind this, head trauma and changing personality traits. (I remember seeing someone on T.V who had Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) after a hit over the head, they were English and woke up with a Jamaican Accent)
Our brains are funny things.

The story feels like a lot of loose threads though, Cisco, the Dr, the flowers, the floozy he brings home, all felt incidental - I wanted them to connect in a better way. It needs something to tie it together, like if the wife was the cause of his head injury which is why she stayed with him for so long despite his new way of life, and playing on the drama that way.

Best of luck

Interesting idea here and I liked a lot of the writing on display.

But it felt a little too extreme in places and came over as a little heavy handed in showing the switch in his nature.

I think there may be more mileage in altering some of the bad Ben stuff so it's cruel and calculating rather than just brutal 0 imho of course.

Decent effort

A bizarro Flowers for Algernon.

I liked the idea in this quite a bit, but I think this needs to be a bigger script. I never felt the tragedy in Ben, he was just a madman and Bridgett should've got far away. Nice Ben would've understood. Either way, we needed to feel for the characters more.

The writing was great though and I think with more space this could be made into a demented but emotional tragedy.

I liked this story, one man's attempt to protect himself and his wife from another attack eventually leads to his demise and death. So much obviously happens to him off screen that this seems in a hurry to cram as much into a small six page script. I think this would make a much better feature expanding on the deteriorating relationship between Ben and Bridget.
Well done.

Another blood y hell response from me.  ;D And another cautionary tale.

The slugs time-wise I think could have been a bit more definitive, kinda weird to read.

This was powerful though - especially with the woman he brings home, totally oblivious to his wife and her feelings - painted a good picture of him being totally unhinged.

He dies at the end, and knows he's on the way out.
Given that, his last words are unnecessarily brutal. I might have preferred he offered her the opposite sentiment.

Another memorable one for sure.

I'm just a bit on the fence as to this one's general audience appeal, but as an exercise in experimental narrative it
packs a punch and is well written.

Smooth enough read but it all felt a bit flat in the end.  Perhaps it’s down to perspective - is this more about Bridgit’s story of losing Ben or Ben’s story of losing himself?

I think I followed this enough to make sense of it.  The structure bounced around a bit but it didn’t seem to matter too much where we were in time.  More about creating a portrait of a life before and after a traumatic brain injury though it did come across a bit too heavy handed in places with a tone that’s hard to place.  Started out like a gritty B-movie but shifted to touches of melodrama - maybe that's intentional?

The Phineas Gage reference could have done with a little more elaboration - that or cut altogether.

Writer,

I liked this, I felt the sadness of who this person used to be and the monster they became, It's got some melancholy to it, Cisco is unresolved though, he plays a huge part into Ben's story but we don't know anything about him other then the guy that caused Ben's head injury, I like how Ben finally regained all his memory at the end, only for it to be too late, tragic. Not a fan of the title though, Think the material is pretty profound for something that sounds like the latest Neason flick, but that's just me.

Well done.