There are people who make a fan film, there’s a handful who make fan films, and then there’s the folks who just latch on to the idea of producing fan flicks like Homer Simpson cuddling a brand-new, baby beer. That’s a bit like HowItShouldHaveEnded.Com. A homemade animation studio of sorts, the HISHE crew is basically six twenty-somethings and their dog kicking out a few shorts a year about one very specific topic: how various popular movies should have ended.
We’ve all had our intelligence insulted by Hollywood on occasion, but here’s a site that returns the favor. The humor is sometimes smart and sometimes drool-inducingly stupid, but more often than not, it hits the mark with a frequency that would tick off any screenwriter who slaved over a flick they skewer. Each flick–ranging from Weird Science to It’s A Wonderful Life to Underworld–gets a re-think, and the emphasis is on the word “think”–as in, “Did everyone involved in the movie really think people wouldn’t notice that stupid ending?”
At their best, HISHE’s movies are nearly everything a comic fan film should be: funny, short and good enough to make you think about them long afterwards. In their take-down of Star Wars, Episode 4: A New Hope, for instance, their version of the movie’s climax is so incredibly obvious, I sat there dumbstruck once it was done. How, in three decades of loving that movie, had I never seen such an obvious lapse of logic? I’ll never watch that movie again the same way–and that is the mark of a good fan flick.
Not all their shorts have to do with the end, per se; if How The Lord Of The Rings Should Have Ended had its way, that epic would have ended part way through The Fellowship of the Ring. The site’s flicks are at their best when short-circuiting the original movies; some of the more experimental editions, like The Matrix Revolutions or Saving Private Ryan just don’t work as well. On the other hand, some experiments, like ending Superman: The Movie with Batman and Supes talking shop over coffee, are brilliant.
Aiding and abetting the whole concept are co-creator/artist Daniel Baxter’s incisive drawings; all the shorts benefit from his clean-yet-sketchy style, and his ability to reduce familiar stars to caricatures is fantastic, rendering them with just enough detail to make them readily apparent, but cartoony enough to add to the silliness at hand. As an bonus, his occasional comic strips available on the site are also a hoot.
If you’re not a movie freak, this site won’t mean much to you, but then again, you probably didn’t read the review this far, then. For the rest of us, HISHE is a great place to find some clever flicks, talented animation and more than a few good laughs.
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