Sam Walker

REVIEWS



TEA BREAK -

Stewart Andrews at THE 2005 INTERNATIONAL MONTREAL FILM FESTIVAL -



In our seemingly spiralling culture of retardation where stupidity

is celebrated as a virtue, it is becoming increasingly rare to

discover genuinely thought provoking horror films that reverberate

long after being viewed. But such is the case with British mini

shocker. Clocking in at a scant six minutes without a word of dialogue

or a single frame wasted.Written by Tim Reeves and Directed by

Sam Walker Tea Break is a masterfully executed exercise

in pure, expressionistic horror.The film depicts a nightmare factory where a

barely cognizant assembly line worker mechanically lops off one human

head after another, completely oblivious to the reality and consequence

of his robotically executed atrocities.

The sight of the freshly severed heads, piling up in the bin, still

blinking leaves one feeling thoroughly corrupted and most unclean.

Much more than a statement against the meat industry this brilliantly

stylized short comments directly on our collective conditioned

senselessness, where a great many of us can neither afford to,

nor are capable of, contemplating the larger implications of what it

is that we actually contribute to humanity as a whole.



TEA BREAK - Kate Stables - Channel 4 review



A quick round of applause please for the Film Four website, for

holding out against the sea of crap that laps at Cybercinema's inbox,

and for featuring short films of consistently high quality and

occasionally, frankly unparalleled weirdness. Chief among them is this

latest offering from Sam Walker, who is our new crush,(we've already

mooned over the equally bizarre and violent Duck Children)and whose

grisly, blood-spattered factory-line fiction had us flinching and

laughing in equal measures. In this Grand Guignol comedy about the

banality of evil, one clock-watching executioner is all that stands

between his victim and freedom - since, rather Britishly, everything

stops for tea.



DUCK CHILDREN - Channel 4 review



Sam Walker's eccentric experimental film, in which a young girl finds

herself trapped in an endless clockwork pantomime which becomes a

bloodbath, is not for the faint of heart. But like the other films

in his twisted trio of shorts (Pool Shark and Tea Break) it casts a

kind of creepy enchantment over the viewer, like a Grimm fairytale

with shotguns instead of magic shoes. Notwithstanding its shoestring

budget of £400, it's a remarkably good-looking and original piece,

filled with offbeat visual touches like the flock of vast, grotesque

papier-mache heads which fill the audience, bobbing approval throughout

their grisly entertainment.

It won the Canal Plus prize at Clermont-Ferrand in 2002, should you

require any more persuading.



Tea Break - review www.twitchfilm.net



Absolutely fantastic production design and attention to detail

in this deadpan black comedy about a bored worker plodding through his day

waiting for his tea break. The fact that his job involves decapitating

the living people rolling his way on a conveyor belt doesn't seem to

phase him in the slightest.