When I started watching this, I didn't know it was an anthology. Netflix offers a very misleading description.
The Crossing opens the movie, with a story of some rednecks driving to the border with plans to kill a few illegal immigrants. Teujung's Lament deals with a lonely widower who foils a kidnapping attempt. Re-membered has a man with a dismembered body in his trunk pulled over. Clowned has a man bitten by a bizarre clown, and he turns into an evil clown himself. Lover Come Back closes the movie with a slow narration.
Hmm. It's not a good anthology. But despite the weak material, the efforts made to tie the stories together are appreciated. That was one of the elements that made Trick R Treat so fantastic was the smoothness with which the stories were tied together. In this case, the longer I watched the movie, the more I was aware of the efforts to draw connections. Most of them weren't great.
Personally, none of the segments came off well. The first one started well, but then it goes directly into a strange zombie scenario. This is compounded by one of the legitimate border guards remarking that the person they've just shot was a zombie. What does this mean? Are zombies something that they expect in this reality? The second story suffered from a similar problem - a good setup, followed by a poor ending.
Re-membered was a remarkably dull story. I'm not too picky about this kind of thing, but the story just raised questions, provided no answers, and left me wondering why they bothered to make a story out of it.
Clowned is the story they use to sell this anthology. It's a decent idea, and I think I would be happy with it, except that the direction really kept this from being all it could be. The tone of the segment kept jumping around, and it was never clear what feeling I was supposed to be getting from it.
The last story was more of a narration, set over some slow direction. It's a short bit - less than 10 minutes long. The segment does accomplish one thing that I liked. Throughout each of the segments, we saw a lady walking awkwardly in the street. I assumed this was tying together with the first segment, that she was supposed to be a zombie. Nope, she's the character in this story.
Where the movie goes wrong is with the twists to these stories. Most of them aren't exactly twists, since they're thoroughly predictable. The one instance where it isn't obvious what's happening is the second story, which used a completely dumb twist.
I know I rarely use that kind of criticism. That twist was dumb.
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