The Sum of Several Sticky Situations involving Salami Sticks
2021 · 21m
Directed by Oli Stening
Genres: crime, dark comedy, horror
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
When novice cop Sonny (Ben Corlett) is robbed of his favorite lunch snack, he enlists his loyal butcher Ivan (Oli Stening) — whose plans prove more sinister than expected — while an oddball lawyer loses his job. Stening's 21-minute horror-comedy unfolds in six chapters of escalating batty, gory farce.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 21-minute fever dream where a stolen salami stick triggers a cascade of violence, betrayal, and legal chaos—it's exactly the kind of premise that makes you go "wait, WHAT?" and then can't stop laughing. Stening builds his own absurdist logic brick by brick, refusing every conventional beat a crime-cop-comedy should hit.
The six-chapter structure and escalating formal control suggest Stening understands the lineage of vignette-based dark comedy, though the film's commitment to surrealism occasionally overwhelms the tonal precision that would elevate it into the conversation with true genre inflection.
The decision to make a butcher character the agent of chaos—using his profession's inherent menace as the emotional backbone—transforms what could've been sketch comedy into something genuinely unsettling, and Stening's casting of himself in that role is the bet that makes the whole thing cohere.
Reviews
Oli Stening's The Sum of Several Sticky Situations involving Salami Sticks commits itself to twenty-one minutes of batty horror and comedy spread across six chapters, following the salami sticks stolen off a cop but going into tangents that are more abrupt than the sprays of blood you get in the face after dismembering a live body. The Sum of Several Sticky Situations involving Salami Sticks finds its humour in the excessive and exaggerated, like schoolboy humour, working well in bits and parts, especially in conjunction with its campy horror.