Doughboy's Hair-Raising Tale of General Enthusiasm

This review contains minor spoilers.

This was a decent attempt. No, in fact, this was a great attempt. What Doughboy's Hair-Raising Tale of General Enthusiasm shines most at, apart from the fact that it has a long title, is showing how much Doughboy himself has improved in making movies. The first thing you will probably notice are the hand-made characters. Impressive stuff. Although we don't see much of them being animated, they certainly are one of the major pluses of Doughboy's Hair-Raising Tale. It really does make this movie the director's, as he steers away from using default actors, and they are made in such a way that we are forced to focus on them, with plenty of face-on scenes, as if the Doughboy wants to show us how much he has improved since the forgettable Killing Ramza Brave. And credit to him, his abilities with 3DMM have improved considerably.

Story-wise, it is pretty solid. Marc is told that he has only one day to live by some random ghost named Zander, and so like any ordinary person would do (leaving out those people who would cry their hearts out by this news) Marc decides to end his life by carrying out his planned tasks. Despite finding nothing funny after being told it had some comedy aspects, it is certainly an enjoyable movie to watch, and the ending, although it probably happened a bit too sudden, was cleverly put together. All this was strung together with some good dialogue, but it was slightly let down by the fairly dull and boring direction. Not only when the characters decided to have a chat, with the constant amount of face-on angles, but also in other places. When Marc walked, turned or did anything in the outside world, I could not help feeling that the camera angles, although adequate, could have been so much more interesting.

But what ultimately lets down Doughboy's Hair-Raising Tale is something which should have been sorted. Unfortunately, Marc's voice was way too quiet compared to Zander's and everyone else's voice. Not only that, but also the music and sound effects. I found it hard to relax by greatly increasing the volume to hear what Marc is saying when, 'BANG', a sudden gunshot, which bearing in mind the volume was raised quite a bit, makes you jump straight after. Nor is it fun having Zander bellowing out what he is saying, just because of Marc's stupidly quiet voice. So, to sum up this paragraph, the voices ruined part of the entertainment.

Being released in a thematic film festival does make it feel special. There might not be many things in this movie with a lot of association with Halloween, but you do pay more attention to it than the average movie you find in New Releases. It is hard not to warm to Doughboy's Hair-Raising Tale, but with a couple of major flaws, it is not quite there to be considered a 'great' movie. With a long and perhaps a misleading title, Doughboy's Hair-Raising Tale of General Enthusiasm is a big step for Doughboy, and I look forward to his next movie he releases in the near future.

Score: 75/100