In Mother of Toads, a couple in Europe come across an old lady who claims to have a copy of the Necronomicon. The man visits her place to look into this, and winds up taking part in a strange ritual. This is clearly the weakest segment. Little plot, a fair number of muddy looking shots. Personally though, I liked it. It moved fast, and it tied into Lovecraft mythos. Even if the story doesn't go anywhere, it's fun.
In I Love You, a man wakes up with a cut on his hand, and some blood on him, then finds his girlfriend arriving to break up with him. It's a story about a confused narrative, and even though the writing is a little ridiculous sometimes, it's a good story.
Wet Dreams is directed by Tom Savini, who also has a role. A man has a recurring dream about being castrated and having it served to him. This was a lot of fun. It's a series of nested dreams, and it isn't entirely clear whose dreams they are. At first, I thought that all of the dreams were the wife's, but the husband has information from one of those dreams that implies that at least one of them was his. Or maybe that section of the dream was a recollection from real life? Regardless, this story is fun, and Savini indulges his appreciation for gore.
The Accident is a classy segment. It's a talk about death, flashing back to a slow-motion recollection of an accident that a mother and daughter saw. It's hard to write about this one without making it sound less interesting than it is. It's arguably the most realistic segment in this collection, and there's something nice about that. It doesn't sensationalize anything, and, if anything, it's probably the most optimistic segment.
Vision Stains is where things get really strange. A lady, either homeless or posing at a homeless person, uses a needle to pull some liquid from people's eyes as they die. Then she injects that liquid into her eye, where she is able to experience the dying person's entire life. She then writes their stories down. Lots of disturbing shots of needles and eyes. The twist is that she decides that she wants to try this process on a fetus. This break in logic hurts the story. She plunges a needle into a pregnant woman's belly and pulls some of this liquid. I thought the liquid had to come from the eye! If it doesn't, why does she pull it from her victim's eyes? The reveal is decent. Still, this segment may have bothered me the most. As fanciful as some of the other stories are, this one seemed sloppy.
Then the last segment is Sweets. This was one of the most bizarre segments. A couple is breaking up. At least she is trying to break up, in a very bored way, by spouting every cliche breakup line possible. He counters each of them. We are treated to a series of flashbacks, during which they're constantly eating cake, pie, candy, nearly anything sweet. I don't want to give away the ending, but it's probably the strangest segment. I wonder if the film would benefit from this story being put elsewhere.
As you know, I'm not picky about my horror anthologies. I usually like them, even if they aren't especially great. This is a far better anthology than I expected. The cover art, and the look of the film made it look like a movie from the 80s or 90s, rather than 2011. The effects work seemed to be practical effects all the way through, which I like.
What sets this anthology apart is how bleak the whole thing is. All of the stories end on a down note. Perhaps not entirely a down note. But there is never a villain who is defeated. There's death, there's torture, and none of it feels like a good thing. I admire this. It's hard to make a commercially viable movie where the bad guys win.
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