The first is Dante the Great. An amateur magician finds an enchanted cloak and becomes a superstar magician. The cloak seems to have a wide range of supernatural abilities, acting as a portal sometimes, then granting the wearer a variety of telekinetic abilities. This segment is really very fun, but it’s far too short. This is a premise that could have easily been extended to feature length, although it would have to be recast. The lead has just the right amount of slime for the role, but the female lead has a few one-liners that sound terrible coming out of her. This segment also would have done a lot better if it wasn’t framed as a found-footage story.
Parallel Monsters deals with a man who - along with his parallel universe counterpart - builds a doorway to connect the universes. The two of them swap universes to look around for fifteen minutes. In that time, things start pretty normal, and the differences between the universes become more pronounced, creepy, and eventually deadly. This was really good. There seems to be a single obvious difference between the universes at first, but the degree that reality has split only becomes clear much later.
Bonestorm comes next, (“Buy me BoneStorm or go to hell!”) which has a group of skater kids that go to Mexico to finish filming a skate video. They wind up in an area that seems to be used for some kind of ritual to raise a creature. I don’t care about skate culture, but there’s a ridiculous aspect to this story. It goes crazy, and it keeps on going longer than you expect it to. There isn’t much of a payoff for it, but it remains fairly fun.
The framing story is called Vicious Circles, and it’s better than the other framing stories have been. It’s confusing, and it plays as a collection of disjointed scenes. There are still weird things that are never explained, but by the end, you feel like you understand roughly what’s happened.
This movie hasn’t gotten a great reception, but I think it’s actually better than the second. There aren’t many high points, but there also aren’t any really low points. I usually feel like this is more important. It’s a solid level of quality, which is rare for an anthology movie.
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