Pick Nick (1977)

... aka: Picnic

... aka: Picknick

Directed by:

Dick Maas

Going to go ahead and continue on with a few more titles from the obscure 1996 VHS release "The Nether Horror Collection", which contains ten horror shorts from Dutch directors (see below for full list). Pick Nick is both the earliest short in the compilation (all of the rest are from the 80s and 90s) and, at 5 minutes, the shortest.

An older man (Cor van Rijn) decides to take his blind wife (Henny Alma) to a surprise location to have a picnic and celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. You can tell right from the get-go that she's not a terribly pleasant woman to be around (perhaps for good reason as the ending certainly attests!) and is already complaining about what they're doing before she even knows what they're doing. The man pulls the car off the main road and parks by some trees; letting her know what a beautiful location he's picked in the forest especially for her. How romantic. There's a bench nearby. He suggests she step out of the car and go have a seat. She, however, is apprehensive and instead makes a dig at him being a failure at his job because he's an alcoholic when he takes a swig of liquor and claims it's lemonade. Her sense of smell is still intact, after all. And if he's going to lie about something so trivial then he'd probably lie about more important things, right?

The two continue the casual bickering. The man seems nervous and starts sweating. And when she asks him to get a scarf out of the trunk for her because she's cold, he hesitates, opens the door, just barely steps out, doesn't actually go to the trunk and then quickly comes back inside. All is eventually revealed with a funny (well, I should say morbidly funny) ending that I won't give away except to say the film uses a lot of tight close-ups and seldom leaves the inside of the car for a reason. While this is kind of a one joke thing, it's a pretty amusing joke, so that's OK.

Maas also made Historia morbi (1975), a 22-minute short about father-and-son serial killers that I had no success in finding (sounds interesting though!) and a number of other shorts prior to making his feature debut with the black comedy Rigor Mortis in 1981. Two years later he made the internationally success killer elevator film The Lift (1983), which was a huge box office hit in Europe and remains one of the most famous Dutch genre films to this day. It became so well-known that the director was even able to get backers to bankroll the higher-budgeted remake Down aka The Shaft (2001) nearly two decades later. It was a flop despite a delayed U.S. home video release hoping to capitalize on Naomi Watts, who starred in it immediately before she became popular. Maas also made the serial killer film Amsterdamned (1988), the killer St. Nick film Saint (2001) and the killer lion film Prey (2006).

★★1/2