Rejected
The quandaries of the modern tech giant are myriad; how to launch an exciting new product, to shape the perception of it so that the affluent target demographic sees it as not merely desirable but essential, a gateway to new possibilities? An early digital camera from the Sonu empire launched in 1997, the Mavico went through several advertising campaigns, all of them rejected, before it found its niche in the market.
The Sonu Corporation also moving into broadcasting, empty channels crying out for content to fill the hours and nothing ever wasted, it was perhaps inevitable that those rejected campaigns might see the light of day, or at least the graveyard slot, hosts Bob Dergens and Sharron Nelson linking three such segments in a filler slot showing the versatility of the Mavico in capturing demonic forces as they manifest, the massacre of friends hiking in the forest, and the casting of a hex on an unfaithful lover.
Written and directed by The Spirit of Haddonfield’s Rene Rivas who also stars as Degas, providing vacuous commentary alongside Sarah Llewellyn as Nelson, smiling for the cameras while touting the marvel of the Mavico, Rejected captures the square-formatted, VHS quality, floppy-disk enabled fin de siècle of late nineties with the requisite on-the-nose acting favoured by infomercials to emphasise the selling points, the fashions as terrifying as any horror film.
An era which now seems like a cry for help from the dying days of the last century, Rejected squeezes three shorts into the frame, perhaps slipping out of the punchy format of the commercial as the horrors unfold upon the characters, but entertaining with the variety squeezed into fifteen minutes and impressing with practical effects and the retro-technology dusted off and brought to life for the production, chunky keyboards and cathode ray monitors, all told with a thrilling 7.9 x optical zoom.
Rejected is streaming on the Arrow platform now
