I was happy to have scored a seat at the SXSW Midnight Shorts screening at the Lamar late Monday night. It had started to rain and, once again, the theater sidewalk was packed with moviegoers.

A dozen weird, whimsical, raunchy and freaky shorts made the cut, and almost all of them were engaging and, often, hilarious.

Jim Owen’s “Can We Talk?” sits with a man and a woman going through the motions of breaking up only to take the conversation into some unexpectedly intimate areas. The music video “Fix My Dick,” by PJ Raval, fits neatly into that category of things you desperately wish you could unsee. D.W. Young’s “Not Interested” sets up the tension-filled premise of a clueless knife salesman ringing the doorbell of a woman who’s got some unwanted company.

Cosmo Jarvis’s “The Alleyway” is a very funny spoof of an over-earnest documentary voiceover as it describes an alley in the most pretentious and portentous tones possible. “Eagles Are Turning People Into Horses,” by Brian McElhaney, is… man, I don’t know where to start with this one, but it involves a group of guys committed to turning the tide against the eagles that are turning people into horses.

And then there’s Bobby Miller’s “TUB,” which screened at Sundance as well and follows what happens after a guy frustrated by his girlfriend’s rebuff masturbates in the shower and somehow impregnates his bathtub. While the practicality of this scenario is depicted, it’s how the circumstance changes the “hero” that really surprises.

About Simon Rumley’s feature “Red White & Blue,” which I saw at the Lamar late Sunday night, the less said the better. It’s a wretched, pointless little film about a trio of damaged and deranged people on a collision course with their own basest instincts.

Amanda Fuller, in an admittedly demanding role, plays Erica, an abused young woman who turns to sex addiction to perpetuate her own constant feelings of violation. Marc Senter plays Franki, whose mother is dying of cancer and who with his friends takes Erica up on a random offer of group sex. Then there’s Noah Taylor as Nate, a sadistic Iraq War veteran who moves into Erica’s building and strikes up a creepy but protective friendship with her.

Things go off the already low-rent rails once Franki discovers that he contracted HIV from his encounter with Erica, kidnaps her and sets a vengeful Nate — who was offered unspecified dirty work for the CIA after his honorable discharge — on his trail.

Um, scalpings, torture, suicide and dismemberment ensue.

That it was shot locally in and around Austin — including at the very theater in which we were all sitting — turned out to be the only redeeming quality of a film that writer-director Rumley (“The Living and the Dead”) described during the post-screening Q&A as “a horror film for the 21st century.”

Well, it may have been grasping for something brainy, but all I saw was a handful of blood-crusted hair.