2015's "Stop The Roadkill" short feels like an odd mishmash of concepts. What starts out as a self-confessed PSA about the millions of critters killed on America's roads by the week culminates in marketing for Bosch's "on fleek" brand of windscreen wipers. The presence of the Humane Society logo at the end assures us that this passionate plea on behalf of imperilled wildlife was entirely sincere; even so, having it all boil down to an endorsement for a brand of wipers causes it to play somewhat like the protracted set-up to a gag. An elaborate display followed by a quick punchline, posing a simple solution to a problem that we suspect is quite a bit more complicated. The impact of roads on wildlife populations is nothing to be sneezed at (remember how much it kept coming up as a losing scenario when we looked at the Survival books three years ago?), and I'm sure there are a whole number of factors to be taken into consideration when looking to reduce it (speed, constructing roads in ways that avoid breaking up habitats in the first place, etc). But as a starting point, fair enough - in order to avoid collisions (with wildlife, other motorists or anything else) you do need to be able to clearly see what's in front of you. A car with insufficient components won't be doing any favours to anyone. And as the ad's hook makes clear, a driver is only as good and as benevolent as the vehicle they hop around in. The scrawny cast don't care to distinguish, repeatedly urging the viewer to avoid being a killer car, as opposed to not simply steering one.
There's a likeable novelty to the production. The smashed and rotting corpses of five different animals, representative of those millions who wind up as roadkill every week, are reanimated under the light of the full moon. Having failed to make it safely to the other side, they find themselves stranded in an undead limbo, bound to the asphalt and cursed to bemoan their miserable fates to a retro dance track vaguely reminiscent of Michael Jackson's "Thriller", although not a full-on pastiche (Vincent Price-esque narration sequence notwithstanding). A promotional blurb included on the Andrew Barrett Creative website informs us that the tune in question is 100% original (and was also composed by "a famous musical producer" who goes identified), although for me is still has a curious, even comforting air of familiarity - I've a sneaking suspicion that I've heard it in sampled on some vaporwave track, but I don't recall the specifics.
The biggest thrill of the video is in the puppetry and character designs. I dig the various smaller touches that give each of the zombie critters their own distinct flavours as they twist their pulverised, disintegrating hides to the cautionary beat. Their grotesqueness is counterbalanced by a warmth and personality that keeps the tone intrinsically fun, even as a flattened squirrel with glowing green eyes spewing the stomach-churning details about the damage dished out to his body parts and internal organs when he found himself caught beneath the wheels of a truck. His being a squirrel means we get an inevitable "nuts" innuendo - almost as inevitable as the rapping skunk who gives us a demonstration of his anal artially by producing a cloud of noxious green gas (reinforcing the misconception that skunks are effectively passing gas in defence, as opposed to repelling their predators with foul-smelling liquid, but I suppose the biology might vary with an undead skunk, or "dead mother trucker", in the words of his bunny back-up). But it's delivered with a brutal starkness that fits the ad's playfully warped vibe. The creatures all have unique injuries that point to their individual tales of woe. The deer has a tree-shaped air freshener and rear view mirror hooked around his antlers (making me wonder if the driver fared any better in the collision, since it implies that he went through the windshield of the car that hit him), and uses a Deer X-ing sign as a painfully ironic crutch. The skunk has skid marks running in a perfectly vertical line down his back, and wears a licence plate on his front as bling. The rabbit's leg detaches and does its own independent jig, and one of his ears looks like it's hanging by a thread. The fox has flashing brake lights embedded into her chest, bone protruding from her tail, and can rotate her broken neck 360 degrees a la Regan from The Exorcist (she also detaches it in a later scene). For zombies, they seem like a mostly benign bunch, in generally wanting little more than for motorists to be conscious of their plight. The skunk is the only one who expresses any vindictive intent, in awaiting the opportunity to get back at the SUV-driving, carpooling soccer mom responsible for his unwanted second stripe by directing the full fury of his unhallowed anal glands her way.
The ad climaxes with a car appearing on the road, but stopping well short of the undead menagerie. The unseen driver uses Bosch brand wipers and thus has zero trouble in seeing them ahead...although with that in mind I'm surprised that they aren't freaked out by the sight of these uncanny critters jiving in plain sight and don't immediately make a u-turn back to civilisation. But perhaps that too is a testament to how calmly in control they feel as a result of having those wipers installed. Having made their point, most of the animals start to slink back into the roadside shrubbery, but the squirrel persists in dragging the moment out past its natural conclusion, leaping up onto the hood of the car and getting ejected by the wipers. Invaluable tools in helping you to deal with the unexpected, including pesky zombie sciurines with chips on their shoulders (and also in their nuts). We close with the tagline "Invented for life", which in this context has a crafty double meaning.
The legacy of the short is somewhat of a phantom one, at least from my own late-to-the-party perspective. At the time it became "an internet sensation and Bosch's most effective online film ever" (according to A Barrett) it must have passed me by - meaning that I didn't attempt to access its official website, which reportedly had biographies for each of the quintet, until it had slipped away to Defunctville. I'm not having much luck it pulling up this information when I try whacking it into the Wayback Machine either, so if the characters had names I guess they'll have to remain a mystery to me, along with any details to their backstories that are finer than what the ad itself makes evident (the fox and rabbit, for example, don't get to tell their stories in the lyrics, so it might have been interesting to learn how they came a cropper). More curious still are the gallery of gifs and production images on the A Barrett page, which (in addition to showcasing some neat concept art) indicate that the ad even had its own miniature line of tie-in merchandising. There are tantalising photos showing a keychain of the deer and a vinyl pressing of the song, although I'm not 100% convinced that the latter even existed and wasn't just a mock-up created as a tongue-in-cheek promotional image (for one, I can't seem to locate a Discogs entry for the item - if it was real, then I'd hazard a guess that it was only available in a strictly limited capacity, as a special promo item given out to press or to crew members, or something). Perhaps it's only appropriate that these decomposing creatures should linger on in a fragmentary form, no longer the full picture of what they once were, destined to haunt my unsatiated curiosity for evermore with their incompleteness. But so long as the ad itself is able to keep on circulating, the spirit of this demented nocturnal rave can keep rising up, furthering its huggably nightmarish cycle for innumerable full moons to come.
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