11.09.09 By: Peter Hall
[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]
It's always hard to believe it when filmmakers say they had never seen or heard of another, similar film when they made theirs. Such is the case with Black Button, a 7-minute short from some aspiring Australians made for a mere $200 featuring a well dressed man who offers a person $10,000,000 if he'll simply press a button, killing someone else in the process.
Dark Heart Productions, the makers of Black Button, claim to have no knowledge of Richard Matheson's Button, Button, the Twilight Zone episode that inspired The Box, and in this particular case I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Their short has a very different ending and moral core than either incarnation of Matheson's story; and unlike The Box, at only a handful of minutes, Black Button doesn't have nearly enough time to spread itself too thin.
Check it out.
Filed under: Fan Movies
Tags: Black Button, BlackButton, Button, Richard Matheson, RichardMatheson, Sci-Fi Lunch Break, Sci-fiLunchBreak, short film, ShortFilm, The Box, TheBox
Thoeat 11-09-2009
There's no way the creators of this short never heard of Richard Matheson's original, and this is in no way better than The Box.
Danaat 11-09-2009
I actually first saw this a year or two ago and immeadiately thought of it when I heard the concept of The Box. I had never heard of the Twilight Zone episode even though I have seen several episodes so I am willing to believe that the makers of this video never had either, afterall there were a lot of Twilight Zone episodes, and who knows how frequently it ran in Australia.
MLat 11-10-2009
This is so similar to The Box (though I can't speak to what they did with the concept in the movie version). I saw the twist coming from the outset, but not bad.