Rian Johnson's student short about an evil golf ball will soon be available for streaming
Many years ago, before he was the guy who decided that Joseph Gordon-Levitt should look more like Bruce Willis and before he correctly realized that Star Wars would be vastly improved with the addition of adorable bird creatures, Rian Johnson was just a regular student at the USC School Of Cinematic Arts. Soon, a short film that Johnson made at USC when he was a senior in 1996 is going to be available for streaming thanks to sci-fi platform Dust and its USC Film Student Week. This comes a year after Dust landed the rights to George Lucas’ famous student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, granting viewers a glimpse into Star Wars history, but Johnson’s student short sounds a bit more bizarre than that big of film history.
That’s because Johnson’s short is called Evil Demon Golf Ball From Hell!!!, and Deadline says it’s a “send-up of the Edgar Allen Poe classic The Tell-Tale Heart” about “a guilty man haunted by a fiendishly persistent tormentor from the world of sporting goods.” It’s a wacky one, in other words, but Deadline says it’s been held as an example at USC of “how to make an incredible short on a shoestring budget”—which means it must also be pretty good. Of course, there are probably USC students who would disagree and say that the behavior of the killer golf ball is completely different from the killer golf ball they saw in all of those other killer golf ball movies, but they’re wrong.
Dust, which can be accessed on its website or with new Roku and Twitch channels, will be premiering a new USC student short every day this week, with Evil Demon Golf Ball From Hell!!! not coming until Friday. Luckily, you can watch a new trailer for the short below that should give you an idea of its tone—or at least we assume it’s new, as it could also just be shockingly prophetic about Johnson’s career.