Devil Woman

Doing something daft that leads to you getting bitten by a wild animal you're supposed to be protecting is embarrassing, especially if you're a science student keen to assert that your academic skills have some value in the real world. this is probably why Eddy (Marigold Pazar) doesn't tell anybody when it happens. She'd rather show off the photo she's got, showing that the area is indeed inhabited by Tasmanian devils, an officially protected species. But the photo shows something else she doesn't expect. When, later, loggers arrive to try and smash up the protest camp, they encounter something that they didn't expect either.

Tasmanian devils have become endangered due to a highly infections cancer which causes tumours to grow on their faces. Desperate efforts are being made to save them from extinction - you can find out more here if you'd like to help - and basing a short horror film on this is an innovative way of drawing worldwide attention to the problem. Unfortunately there aren't really any other ideas in the film. The camp and its inhabitants are well conceived, not too indulgent but not too patronising either. The loggers are cartoonish, A-team style thugs. There's a fair helping of gore at the end, but not much else.

Underdeveloped as it is, Devil Woman works better as a campaign advert than as a film. It inevitably struggles with the fact that whatever horrors it shows us, they can't come close to the horror of what's happening to the devils in real life.