The Milk Situation

The premise of The Milk Situation is a fairly straightforward one: There’s an office block full of monsters and only two unlikely heroes who are able to stand up to them and save the day. Pip (Bradwell) and Po (Guyer) are part of a ‘clean-up service’ crew and it appears that part of their business is taking care of the monsters which now seem to be running amok within the building. This is, however, the only lead-in or backstory that you’re gonna get in this less than five-minute short, and if you’re wondering how the monsters got there or what it is they’re actually up to, then I’m afraid you’re going to be mightily disappointed.

Shot on a micro-budget of around only five-hundred pounds, and filmed in a single day, The Milk Situation naturally opts for the easily made monsters, such as a girl filled with demonic possession and an Uncle Fester type dude sporting a couple of lengthy blades. There is also a werewolf running around who gets rather a meaty role, which is likely to have been a cost effective decision from writer/director John Ferrer, to use a costume from one of his previous movies, Hairy (2022). However, there’s nothing on the level or scale of the beast from another of Ferrer’s projects, Trial 22 (2023) and as such the threat and tension raised from the monsters that we do get all seems a little lacklustre.

The story, such as it is, revolves around Po and his handling of the milk, but really all that’s going on is a couple of guys bumbling into stock horror scenes and then everyone beating the crap out of one another. Although nothing in the entire scenario seems realistic and shlock comedy-horror is the order of the day, the fight scenes do have a real energy to them, with cinematographer Maxwell Whitaker pushing and pulling the camera all over the place to embed the audience into the action. There are some nice hefty sound-effects and tasty blood-spatter also added into the mix and whilst a single fight-scene does not a movie make, it is at least a good one which drives the main part of this short.

For something which started life as an experiment and was obviously produced off-the-cuff, The Milk Situation was never going to be bigger or better than what it actually is. What it does do though, is speak to the filmmaking ability of John Ferrer and his team to create fun, horror-lite shorts at the drop of a hat. Whereas Hairy had a perfect blend of comedy, romance and horror and Trial 22 was let down by bad plotting and continuity holes, The Milk Situation knows exactly what it is and doesn’t need to do anything to escape that. As a test of teamwork and production skill, John Ferrer got exactly what he needed from The Milk Situation, but as an audience we’re going to want a bit more time and effort on story and characterisation, alongside the technical wizardry, from whatever Ferrer and his team bring us next.