Lunch Ladies (horror/comedy)
19 min.
Directed by J.M. Logan
Written by Clarissa Jacobson
Starring Donna Pieroni & Mary Manofsky
I first had the pleasure of seeing Lunch Ladies at Nightmares Film Festival in October of 2017. We were there premiering I’m Dreaming of a White Doomsday and of course had to attend the horror comedy shorts block, a decision that paid off tremendously.
Lunch Ladies is a short film version of a (hopefully) upcoming feature film that tells the story of Soretta and LouAnne, two burnt out high school lunch ladies err…CHEFS, my apologies to them. One morning they discover that their recipe for Cheesey Burger Bites has been selected as the grand prize winner of a culinary contest by Johnny Depp, for whom they have an obsessive love for. They desperately want to go to the award ceremony which features a concert by The Depper himself so they can convince him to hire the two of them as his personal chefs, but unfortunately they must continue slaving away at their high school cafeteria job to earn the money for plane fare. Needless to say things don’t go quite as planned and circumstances lead them to create a new recipe to feed the student body…
I’m just going to put it right out there: Lunch Ladies is one of the best short films I have ever seen. It plays out like John Waters, Tim Burton, and Herschell Gordon Lewis had a mutated love child and it is glorious to behold. There is not a single moment wasted in its 19 minute run time thanks to Clarissa Jacobson’s razor sharp script and Josh Logan’s pitch perfect direction. That is of course not to take away credit from the lunch ladies themselves, Donna Pieroni (who just took home Best Actress- Short Film at Crimson Screen Film Festival) and Mary Manofsky who deliver performances that had me literally crying with laughter. And don’t worry, there’s plenty of the red stuff on display, courtesy of SOTA FX’s Matt Falletta. The delightfully batshit Danny Elfman-esque score is just the icing on the blood soaked cake and helps whisk the insanity along at a lightning pace.
We’ve had the pleasure of screening alongside Lunch Ladies two more times since our initial encounter, most recently at Crimson Screen where it won Best Short, and I can say with absolute certainty, it gets better each time you watch it. There is such an attention to detail and so many layers to the set pieces that you’ll catch some hilarious or disgusting new detail with each viewing. It is certainly no surprise that Lunch Ladies has taken the film festival circuit by storm, playing all over the world and racking up over a dozen awards.
Do yourself a favor and check out their hilarious website and find out where you can see them next, you won’t regret it.
https://www.lunchladiesmovie.com/ Follow along on Facebook here.
Don’t forget to join us Friday June 15th, writer Clarissa Jacobson and FX maestro Matt Falletta will join THS Lives and talk Lunch Ladies more horror!
