45 - The Devil's Carnival

    Three people are sent to hell, which is a carnival run by the devil.
    As a fan of horror anthologies, this has been on my Netflix queue for a long time.  It turned out to be completely different than the description led me to believe.
    There are three stories - sort of.  The stories are mostly a vehicle for musical performances.  It’s primarily a musical, with creepy makeup and some gothic touches, but the horror is pretty tame.  The stories barely qualify as stories.  But this isn’t able plot - it’s about presentation.
    It’s kind of nice, in that regard.  It’s a spectacle, and the music is interesting.  The lyrical approach is a bit flawed, since there’s so much padding of the lyric to match some awkward meter, but it’s always nice to see some music that doesn’t feel predictable.

11 - An Evening in the Zone

    This is a little different - it’s not quite a movie, but it seemed to be on the cusp of being one.  This is a DVD collection of three TV screenplays of Rod Serling’s, done before he found his success with The Twilight Zone.
    First, Nightmare at Ground Zero.  A man who creates mannequins is tasked with creating a family to decorate a house being demolished in a nuclear test.  His henpecking wife bothers him enough that he swaps her with one of the mannequins.
        This is unusually dark for Serling.  He tended to have more of a focus on moral and philosophical issues.  This seems more like a Tales From the Crypt predecessor than his work.  Still, it’s actually pretty enjoyable, mostly because of the interesting mannequin photography.
    Second, The Arena.  This deals with a senator whose father was also a senator.  He spends most of his efforts trying to argue with and discredit a rival of his fathers.  Eventually, he’s offered the opportunity, when he discovers that the rival was once a member of a poorly-regarded organization.  This seems more like classic Serling.  It’s still padded, and it moves slowly until we get to the meat of the story, but there’s something pleasant about it.
    And last, A Town Has Turned to Dust.  A small town lynches a young Mexican boy.  The Mexican population turns against the storeowner that led the mob.  This is an utterly predictable story, but it captures most of Serling’s style and interests.  His writing is ridiculous by modern standards.  There’s hardly enough plot to justify the 83-minute running time… but he manages to accomplish it by throwing all of the backstory you could possibly want, and more.
    But what makes this last story more watchable is the format.  It was broadcast on Playhouse 90, which started off as a live-to-broadcast anthology series.  By the time this episode came along, it seems to have been shot almost the same way, but committed to tape before broadcast.  The result is interesting.  Limited sets, static camera work, a pretty blank background… but it still retains a certain immediacy.  You know that these people are learning their lines and are putting on the best show they can.
    Which brings me to the other high point - William Shatner is actually really good in this.  He doesn’t engage in any of his trademark delivery.  He’s a sleazy, bad guy.  He’s drunk half of the movie.  It’s much more interesting than I expected.

184 - V/H/S: Viral

    Third in the found-footage anthology horror series.
    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.

178 - ABCs of Death 2

    Another 26-short horror film anthology.
    As with the first movie, this is a wildly mixed bag.  The good news is that there is less of a wild fluctuation.  There were “stories” in the first movie that barely qualified as anything other than someone messing around with a camera.  Here, the highs aren’t quite as high, but the floor has been raised enough that it’s hard to say that there are any segments that are completely wasted.
    The Good
        A is for Amateur
            An assassin fantasizes about how his hit will be pulled off.
        B is for Badger
            A nature host finds that extinct badgers are still alive.
        C is for Capital Punishment
            A mob decides to execute a man.
        E is for Equilibrium
            Two guys are stranded on an island, and tension rise when a girl arrives.
        F is for Falling
            A soldier is caught by her parachute on a tree.  An opposing soldier finds her.
        G is for Grandad
            A pest of a grandson is confronted by his bizarre grandfather.
        I is for Invincible
            A family attempts to kill their matriarch, who seems to be invincible.
        J is for Jesus
            An effort to torture homosexuality out of a person falls apart.
        M is for Masticate
            Fat guy goes nutso.  (I'm aware that there is a movie with that title)
        N is for Nexus
            On Halloween, a series of people are brought together by an accident.
        Q is for Questionnaire
            An intelligence quest is juxtaposed with the results of that test.
        S is for Split
            Talking on the phone, a wife is attacked by a masked assailant.
        U is for Utopia
            A man that doesn’t measure up to societal expectations is removed from society.
        V is for Vacation
            A video-chat phone call witnesses violence and murder when a guy calls his girlfriend from vacation.
        W is for Wish
            Two boys with to participate in the fantasy world that their toys represent.
        X is for Xylophone
            A babysitter goes crazy from a kid playing a toy xylophone.
        Y is for Youth
            A girl fantasizes about suiting punishment for her parents.
        Z is for Zygote
            A pregnant lady delays giving birth for a very long time.

    I can’t say that these are all universally good, but the stories are at least complete and understandable.  Some of them are technically very well done or written, others are less so.  I’m a little on the fence about Invincible, since that has a great premise, and it’s executed well, but it leaves with an ending that is mostly impossible to understand.  Some of them push a few boundaries very well - in particular, Xylophone and Zygote.  Split was very well directed, and the twist was not what I was expecting.

    The Bad
        K is for Knell
            Some inky black orb floats over a building and makes people kill each other.
        L is for Legacy
            A tribe is attacked by a supernatural being, in retaliation for not honoring certain commands.
        O is for Olocracy (Mob Rule)
            A woman is put on trial by a court of zombies, for her actions killing zombies.
        R is for Roulette
            A game of Russian Roulette.
        T is for Torture Porn
            A girl is being pushed around in a test shoot for some porn, then weird stuff happens.

    Knell was the one that I was really bothered by.  It started well.  The middle was good.  Then at the end of it, I have no idea what was intended to be expressed.  This changed my perception, and it’s hard for me to feel like it was acceptable.  The same thing happened with Roulette.  I liked everything up until the end, which was implying an interesting twist, and then ended before anything was explained.

    The Ugly
        D is for Deloused
        H is for Head Games
        P is for P-P-P-P-Scary

    These are the ones that I didn’t feel like I could really evaluate.  The first two are animated, and they were interesting, but they don’t really offer a story, just… weirdness.  The last one is probably the strangest story in the movie, and it’s weird, but it didn’t feel like it had anything to offer.

    Still, this is a big improvement over the first one.  I don’t know if I can say that I would want to own these movies, but I think this is a great showcase format, and I hope they keep making these.

32 - Dead of Night

    A horror anthology movie.
    This is a noteworthy anthology, since it may be the oldest one I've seen.  It's from 1945, it's a British production, and it's simultaneously clever, and surprisingly dull.
    The problem is that the stories are either far too predictable, or in one case, it doesn't match the tone of the rest of the movie.
    First, there's a "room for one more" story.  Not much to it, and it has some problems - like nowhere near enough tension built.
    Second, there's a Christmas Party story, which involves someone meeting a ghost, then finding out.
    Third is a Haunted Mirror, which is interesting.  It's not quite what I expected, but it's a pretty normal "possessed item turns owner into a reflection of the original owner."
    Fourth, the Golfing Story.  This is really, really weird.  It builds well enough, two golfers interested in the same girl, have their game to settle who gets her… but the tone shifts into a comedy, which seems very out of place.
    Fifth, a Ventriloquist's Dummy story.  Almost exactly what you'd expect.

    These stories are tired and predictable now (for the most part).  Some of these seem almost like stories for children.  But I wonder if this set the mold for these stories.  There's a good chance that these were much more effective when they were first shown.  Many of these stories have been retold as Twilight Zone episodes.
    The one spot where this movie shines is with a circular framing device.  Variations of this have been used in other anthology movies, but this one actually comes full circle.  It's a pleasing surprise.
     The writing hasn't aged well.  Almost all of the conversation seems too witty.

195 - Scary or Die

    An anthology of five short stories, loosely tied together.
    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.

190 - Screamtime

    Another horror anthology.  Again, spoilers apply.
    First story, That's the Way to Do It, deals with an older man who runs a Punch & Judy puppet show.  His wife and step-son are cruel, and want him to stop doing puppet shows.  The puppets return to get revenge for him.
    The second story is Dreamhouse, which has a couple, recently moved into a house, dealing with a variety of strange sounds and creepy visions and such.
    The last one is Do You Believe in Fairies?  A pair of brothers are looking to get some cash to support their hobby, and one of them takes a job being a handyman for a pair of old ladies.  After finding that they keep all their money on hand, they resolve to rob the ladies.
    It's not a quality anthology.  None of the stories are especially great.  Dreamhouse was actually the best story though, because there's a delightful little twist to the story that I really didn't see coming.  The first story is passable, but not interesting.  The last story is really weird.  It's not scary, it just reaches into a very strange place, rather than keeping things a little more understandable.
    What makes this anthology interesting is that the framing device is clearly set in New York, but every story is a British production.  Not just a British production, but the stories - at least the first and last - seem like they're trying to be distinctly British.  The Punch & Judy show is mostly a European thing (although it seems to have been popular in the US for a time).  The last story deals both with fairies and garden gnomes, but of which are much more popular in the UK.
     I also wanted point out some fantastically exploitative box art for this movie. 

189 - The Theatre Bizarre

    An anthology of short horror stories.  I'm breaking this down a little differently, so there may be spoilers in each section.
    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.

179 - Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear

    An anthology of short horror films, themed around the five senses.
    In Smell, a man receives a cologne of pheromones that makes him an alpha male, and irresistible to women.
    In See, an eye doctor extracts visual memories from his patients, and tries to set an abusive man straight.
    In Touch, a young blind boy tries to find help for his injured parents after a car crash, running afoul of a serial killer who has laid traps in the woods.
    In Taste, a man goes for an interview, encountering a bizarre boss.
    Lastly, in Listen, a group of people work one piecing together a video of a performance of a song that is supposed to kill the people who listen to it.

    There are a few ties between some of these stories.  The boss in the fourth story is looking for someone to acquire the song that the fifth segment is about.  Characters from the first couple stories appear in the fourth.  They aren't tightly woven together, but it's at least a little interesting.
    Like most anthology movies, there are both good and bad points, and there's always a weird balance between gore and actual horror.  Tension takes time to develop, and these stories are told too quickly for that.  The first story was a solid premise, and it felt like a modern version of Tales From the Darkside.  The acting was kind of silly.  The price for his pheromones seems to be that use of them deteriorates his body, eventually killing him.  Not too clever a twist.  But it's an acceptable story.
    See had the potential to be a much more interesting idea, but the execution seemed to push the story in the least interesting direction.  There's much more that he could have learned from memories, especially multiple people, as he pieces a story together.  Instead, the story just seems to want opportunities to gouge eyes.  Meh.
    Touch was a great idea, but it is far too rushed.  All the pieces are there, but it just seems like there's no time to bond with the lead, and every shot seems less artful, and more focused on pushing the story forward.  Normally, I would think this is great, but in this case, it seems like a missed opportunity.
    Taste was the weirdest story, and it seems to have a poor reputation.  I can see why.  It sets things up, then goes straight for gore.  Not terribly interesting.  It's a bit disappointing, since I think there could be a nice dark twist to things.  Instead of playing on the uncomfortable nature of interviews, the interview itself seems to be entirely fine.
    Listen was a mixed effort.  I was pretty interested for most of it, but once we see the performance of the song, it falls apart.  I found myself thinking of John Carpenter's Masters of Horror episode, Cigarette Burns.  A similar story, but Carpenter's approach to the idea is far more interesting, and much more plausible in the world he constructs.  This approach seemed a little weak.
    Overall, it's a passable anthology.  The stories aren't great, some are memorable, but it does have one thing going for it - pacing.  It moves fast, so it's easier to forgive poor choices.

166 - Nightmares

    An anthology of four stories, culled from unaired segments of a short-lived TV show, Darkroom.
    In Terror in Topanga, a lady goes out for cigarettes, despite warnings of an escaped murderer in the area.
    In Bishop of Battle, a young man is obsessed with reaching the final level of an arcade game.
    In The Benediction, a member of the clergy going through a crisis of faith is attacked by a truck during a desert drive.
    And lastly, in Night of the Rat, a family is terrorized by a massive rat.

    I've periodically heard of this movie for a long time, and I finally got around to finding a copy to watch.  For an 80s anthology movie, it's pretty good.  It's very tame - no real gore, only a modest amount of tension.  Production values are moderate, which is about right for being taken from a TV series.  The cast has some great familiar faces.  Emilio Estavez stars in Bishop of Battle, and his little friend is Billy Jayne!  Lance Henriksen stars in The Benediction, and he's a reliable performer.
    The first story is simple, but it's a pleasing start.  It's a common urban legend, but somehow, it doesn't play out the way I anticipated.  After the reveal, I was surprised that it was that simple.
    The second is campy, in the way that outdated impressions of video games are.  The ending isn't scary at all, but I think this reminds me more of the quality that Tales From the Darkside had.
    The third is really the weakest segment, but I don't think the story is at fault.  It's mostly the sound quality.  A lot of the dialogue is mixed very quiet, especially compared to the massive noises of the truck.  It's very annoying.
    The fourth story is actually one of the strongest ones, at least because it's unpredictable.  The same sound issues bring it down a bit, but there's a lot of novelty to be had with a giant rat, and it doesn't go with an obvious ending.  The effects are wonderfully dated, but they try to cover it up by doing some quick edits.

147 - Chillerama

    An anthology of four stories.  A giant sperm terrorizes New York.  A teen gets bitten by a were bear.  Hitler creates a Frankenstein's monster, framed against the last night that a drive-in theater is open.
    As I was watching this, I kept on feeling amazed that I hadn't abandoned it.  I've tried to clean up the description a little bit, but this is packed with juvenile sexual humor.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  If I saw this when I was in high school, I would think it was fantastic.  Somehow, I'm comfortable enough with sexual material that I didn't react correctly to this.  A lot of material just was ignored.
    There's an effort to be taboo, or at least in bad taste.  The story with Hitler is titled The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, and involves Hitler killing Anne Frank and stealing the secrets of creating life.  He assembles a monster from Jewish parts.  There's an abandoned segment, which is clearly intended as a joke, titled Deathification, which involves dramatic footage of people spraying crap - or using crap - in a variety of ways.
    The one segment that I seriously didn't care for was the second one, the Werebear story.  I liked that it made an effort to have musical elements, and that it was a nice fifties throwback vibe, but I just didn't care for their treatment of gay characters.  Normally I'm not too picky about this.
    Despite the ridiculousness of it, I enjoyed the framing device.  The drive-in had characters that were defined reasonably well, and there was something about the location that played well.  I didn't mind the zombie stuff (even though it involved neon blue stuff, and some of the turned people were just wearing what looked like glitter) but I thought that the sex-crazed angle to the zombies just seemed kind of dumb.
    It sounds as if I really didn't like this movie.  That's not true.  I'd never re-watch it, but I actually felt like I would have liked this, much like Kentucky Fried Movie or The Groove Tube.  As an adult, I still found an occasional laugh, just not as many as were intended.

100 - V/HS 2

    Another found-footage horror anthology.
    My feelings about the first V/H/S have improved over time, and I find myself looking forward to getting the Blu-ray of that one eventually.  I wonder if my perception of this one will improve.
    The framing device is a little more interesting this time around.  A pair of private investigators are looking for a missing student.  They look around his apartment, which looks like it's in similar condition to the house in the framing from the first movie.  In fact, we hear a snippet of that framing, which is a nice touch.
    The first story, titled Phase I Clinical Trials, is actually a pretty nice premise, even though it's been done a few different ways.  A man who was in a car accident winds up getting a bionic eye, which is recording everything, in the interest of clinical trials.  He finds that he can see ghosts - or something like that - around his house.  A girl arrives, who plans on giving him some direction about how to deal with them.
    A Ride in the Park was a little aimless, but it's still pretty enjoyable, since it offers a nice variation on a stock zombie story.  The story is told from the POV of a cyclist, who gets infected by a girl he encounters on some bike trails.  He turns into a zombie, and we follow him on his journey, where he infects others, and so forth.  It moves along nicely, but there isn't much substance to this.
    The third segment is Safe Haven, which was really bizarre, but probably the most fascinating of the movie.  A news crew persuades a cult leader to let them interview him at his compound.  The crew wears hidden cameras, along with their obvious camera setup.  It's sort of impossible to explain this story, since it has a wide range of strange, and bloody events.  It's just connected enough that it feels like there's a larger plot to figure out.  There are some fantastic images in it, like a roomful of identically dressed men all committing suicide together.
    Slumber Party Alien Abduction is another strange one.  It started off well, with some sexy sibling shenanigans (which I won't' bother to detail).  Then it gets into some strange territory, as the house, and all the kids, are attacked by aliens.  They look like pretty standard Grey aliens.  This segment would probably work better in theaters.  When the aliens attack, there's a massive loud noise, which would have been much more startling in a theater.  At home, it's just annoying.  Of course, we never learn too much about what the aliens are abducting for, and the story ends with a dog's death (or serious injury) which is not a nice way to end things.
    Then we come back to the framing device, which was suitably weird, but at least it was more satisfying than the first movie's closing.
    The thing that I found more charming in the first movie - that the found footage format lent itself to unresolved stories - doesn't seem to have applied here.  There are a few conclusions, but the stories without an ending (A Ride in the Park and Slumber Party) have serious weaknesses without them.
    Maybe I'd buy this if it were packaged in a two-for-one deal with the first movie.  But I can't say this is especially worthwhile.  Sort of a shame.

30 - The ABCs of Death

    An anthology of 26 short films that deal with death.
    It's impossible to accurately review this movie, since the quality is all over the place, and there are plenty of foreign directors here, some of which reflect very specific issues in other cultures.
    I discovered this movie because I was curious about what Ti West was up to.  I saw that he was credited for this movie.  It's sad to say that I actually think his short is one of the weakest.
    There were a number of sequences that I can say that I really didn't understand.  Gravity (I'm not sure if I understood it.  If I did, it's not a story.) Ingrown, Orgasm, Removed.  There were ones that were bizarre.  Fart was hilarious, but still completely bizarre.  Hydro-Electric Diffusion was interesting, but impossible to figure out.  And Zetsumetsu was probably the strangest one of all, but I don't know if I can claim to understand what it might be about.
    Then there were a bunch that fell into the mid-range.  Klutz, Unearthed, Speed (which may have been referencing Russ Myer movies) or Nuptials.
    The highlights were Cycle, Dogfight, Exterminate, Libido, Pressure, Quack, and XXL.  Each of these offered something unique.  Libido was fascinating, partly because we never learn any background about how the characters come to be in the situation they're in.  Quack is self-aware, and plays out in a very pleasing way, even after building some tension.  XXL was really interesting, mostly because I identify with the story.  A fat girl is teased on her way home.  After getting home and gorging on food, she takes out a knife, and winds up hacking away at her body until she reaches the appearance she wants.  While I haven't had quite the same desire, when I had a fungal infection that wouldn't stop itching, I kept on thinking how great it would be to just cut off that portion.  Pressure was incredibly dark, mostly because it was entirely believable.
    The nature of this project led to some common characteristics.  First, the movies are use a minimal amount of dialogue.  Second, there's a whole lot of slow motion.  I think that Dogfight was entirely in slow motion, except for the last shot.
    Before watching this, I wasn't sure how I would like it.  I love horror anthologies.  This format seems a little tightly wound though.  With about 5 minutes (shorter than that - 10 minutes was taken up with credits) per story, bad stories would soon be over, but good ones would require some more development.  Instead, this shortness meant that some of these directors weren't up to the task.  They made some stories that don't really qualify as stories.  Still, it's an interesting experiment, and I'm glad to see some of these ideas.

177 - V/H/S

    An anthology of horror stories framed as being "found footage" VHS tapes.
    Like all anthologies, it's a mixed bag.  While I started off being a little disappointed by this one, by the end, I liked it much more.
    What I liked is also a weakness that will frustrate many viewers.  Most of the stories don't resolve everything you would like.  There needs to be a certain amount of interpretation to finish off the stories.  I feel this way when I read short stories.  Usually the author likes to pack a punch into a single paragraph, and I need to read it several times to decipher what exactly has been revealed - or implied.
    In the case of this movie, I actually liked this effect, and it may have been because the format made that approach make sense.  We only see what the person shooting it created.  We don't get to rely on third parties to offer explanations, or exposition to fill in the backstory.
    I'll probably give plenty of spoilers, since these stories are very short, and most of the plot points are either obvious, or things that develop in the first couple minutes of a story.
    The framing story is called Tape 56.  A handful of thuggish meatheads are commissioned to break into someone's house, and steal a particular VHS tape.  They don't know anything about the content, but the house seems to be mostly empty, except for a single room with a bunch of TVs, VCRs, and a dead guy sitting in a recliner.  There's an ending to this frame, much like most anthologies.  It isn't especially satisfying, but it's appropriate.
    The first story is called Amateur Night.  Three guys go out to a bar to pick up some girls, with the intention of filming their encounter.  One of the girls passes out after they get to a motel room, the other one is really bizarre.  I found the ending a little confusing, but there seems to be some speculation that the story involves a succubus.  I don't think that's right.  This story is decent, but it seems a little too obvious.  There's a similar story in Trick 'R Treat, which was handled much better.
    The second story is directed by Ti West, who also did The Innkeepers, which I obviously really love.  This one is called Second Honeymoon.  Like most of his work, it moves very slowly, and deliberately.  The story is good, and I could imagine it being an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or something like that.  The ending isn't the spectacular twist that some have played it out to be, but it's certainly appropriate, and doesn't seem like a stretch.
    The third story has a poor reputation, but there was something I really liked about it.  Titled Tuesday the 17th, it starts off like most "dead teens in the woods" movies.  There's a reasonable twist about halfway through, and I actually like the idea of expanding that premise into an entire movie.  We're left with a lot of questions about the killer in this.  IMDB lists that part as being "The Glitch" and the wiki page for the movie describes him as "a red-faced silhouette obscured by tracking errors."  The killer seems strangely invincible, which isn't an approach that I like.
    The next one is The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger.  This one is an excellent story, which somehow makes me think of Richard Matheson's short stories.  The story has much more enjoyable photography, since it's portrayed as a series of Skype chats.  The girl thinks that her apartment is haunted.  I can't explain a lot of this story without detailing the entire thing, but I watched this segment twice, once in the movie, and once with Cathy.  It's creepy, it's got a touch of gore, and the effect is fantastic.  When the story ends, we are left with more questions.  My one complaint is that this story doesn't make sense to appear on a VHS tape.  Why would someone transfer a collection of Skype chats to a VHS tape?
    The last story is titled 10/31/98.  This one is a good, energetic one to end the movie on.  A group of friends attend a Halloween party, but they find that no one seems to be in the house.  After searching around for awhile, they find an exorcism - or something - being done in the attic.  They decide to try to rescue the girl, and as they try to escape, the house seems to come to life.  The effects in this sequence are fantastic.  The arms coming out of the wall are seamless, and the audience is left just as confused as the main characters.  The ending is a bit bleak, but it seems appropriate.

    So, obviously I'm very happy with this anthology.  I'm not sure if I'll buy it yet.  It isn't as artistically pleasing as Trick 'R Treat is, but I wonder if my fondness for this one will grow over time.  My enthusiasm for anthologies usually grows.

145 - Creepshow III

    An anthology of horror stories.
    The first two Creepshow movies were a lot of fun.  They were associated with George Romero and Stephen King, who knew how to handle horror material well.  This third movie had been rumored for a long time, and when it happened… everything I read about it was really bad.  So I was surprised when I saw it at the local library.
    The framing device was a bad sign.  The animation was pretty poor, and it seemed to be in bad taste.  Some covered-up being is approached on a neighborhood sidewalk by a happy dog.  Off camera, the being kills the dog, and puts it on a little wagon.  The being is then shown to have opened a hot dog stand, where it is serving the remains of the dog on buns.  No humor to it, unless you consider "hot dog" to be a joke.
    This leads to the first story, Alice.
    Alice is a typically bratty teenage girl, who walks home through her neighborhood, talking on her cell phone, and complaining about stuff.  When she gets home, there's some awkward dialogue, while her father futzes around with a new universal remote.  As buttons on the remote get pushed, Alice goes through a bunch of variations of her family.  First, they're all black except for her.  Then they're all speaking Spanish.  Then no one seems to be able to hear her.  With each iteration, Alice accumulates a variety of strange bloody boils.
    I'm leaving out the ending, in the interest of not having spoilers here.  This story is bad, and it's bad in a lot of different ways.  First, the premise of a remote control that can manipulate reality has been done.  It's been done very well, and it's been done really badly, but it's been done often enough that this seems redundant.  Second, the acting is bad.  Everyone seems to be acting strangely, but it never seems like it was on purpose.  And this acting quality seems to permeate the rest of the movie.  Third, this was not a horror story.  The story seemed to shoehorn some gore into the story in a nonsensical way.  Why does she seem to get these strange patches of gore?  We never know why.  She doesn't even seem to care too much, except for near the end.  Fourth, as a character that we're supposed to dislike, she's not bad enough.  She's as bad as a stereotypical teen girl, but she doesn't stand out.
    The second story, The Radio, was actually a bit better than I expected.  A guy buys a radio from a homeless man.  The radio starts talking to him, giving him instructions, advising him.  This doesn't play as dark as expected.  It's kind of funny to hear the radio give him financial advice, as well as instructions on what he should have to eat.
    The story plays out kind of predictably.  The one thing that bugged me is that the apartment the guy is living in is really strange.  It is clearly a different set from the apartment building that he enters from.

    The third story, Call Girl, focuses on one of the prostitutes we saw hanging around during the second story.  She gets a call to go out to a suburban house for a job.  She kills the client, then finds out that he's a vampire.  I think.  It isn't obvious that he's a vampire, since the appearance is really strange.
At least this story was short.
    The fourth story has a professor inviting two of his prize pupils over in advance of his wedding.  They meet his bride, and think she has to be a robot.  Of course, this leads to the two of them dismembering her, in an effort to find proof.
    There are two big problems with this section.  First, it's played as a comedy, but there's nothing funny about it.  Second, I have a hard time believing that two college graduates would knock someone out, and cut them up (with a hand-held electric drill, no less) in order to prove that they are a robot.  Maybe if the segment were funny, I'd be willing to believe that their decision made sense.
    The fifth story is really strange.  A really bad doctor causes the death of a homeless guy by giving him a hotdog that fell on the ground.  The apparition of this homeless guy haunts the doctor for a few days.  In the meantime, the doctor continues to be a jerk on the job.  He takes a variety of prescription medication, and supplies similar drugs to a party, which is hosted by the vampire from the earlier segment.  This story suffers from two other problems.  The first is that the guy is actually too much of a jerk.  This doesn't happen too often, but he's actually so tastelessly mean and offensive, and he isn't funny.  This makes it so the story is more of a chore to watch than it should be.  The other problem with this segment has to do with the ghost of the homeless guy.  We get to see the ghost produce a hotdog, first by pushing it from his mouth.  Later, the ghost has a stab wound (which makes another kind of nonsense) and the ghost pulls a hotdog from that.
    The movie does make substantial efforts to feel like there are lots of links between the stories.  Unfortunately, none of these links have any meaning.  This reminds me of Trick R Treat, which was anthology-like, but linked those stories masterfully.  Here, it just seems like they recycle the actors and put them into the background of other stories.

    Then the movie ends with a strange capper - the end of the wedding of the professor, and his bride, which he seems to have rebuilt somehow.  There are a few lost limb gags.  We get to see the rabbit from the first story (which also made an appearance during the professor's story.  Of course, that doesn't make any sense, since she wasn't a rabbit yet).

    I'm not a picky horror watcher, as you probably know.   But I actually feel like this movie hurt itself by using the name Creepshow.  By using the name, it implies that this will be similar quality.  Or at least that it will have a similar feel.  The name raised the expectations.  Instead, if this had a different title, an original title, then I wouldn't judge it as harshly.  Sadly, this movie is Creepshow 3, and it's going to continue disappointing horror fans for a long time.

16 - The House That Dripped Blood

    The last of these Amicus horror anthologies.  This one was my favorite of them.  The first one involved a writer dealing with one of his creations coming to life.  The second has a figure in a wax museum that a guy gets fixated on.  The third has a young girl with an oppressive father.  And the last one has a horror actor discovering a cloak that turns him into a vampire.

    The stories were generally interesting, paced well, and had some nice tension to them.  I didn't feel like I was waiting for them to give away the ending.

    These anthologies are enjoyable, and it's hard to explain why.  They aren't especially scary, they don't feature fantastic scripts or acting, and they're pretty dated.  But I think I like seeing them because they were cheap productions that squeezed all they could out of the budget.  The sets are really good.  They exhibit some clever effects work for the time period.  They don't come across as self-important or even trying too hard.  They feel like horror made by people who really enjoyed watching an unserious horror production.

    Also note - despite the title, there is NO blood in this movie.

14 - Tales That Witness Madness

    Another Amicus horror anthology.  I think I liked this one more than the other ones.  The first story involves a boy with an imaginary friend tiger.  The second has a guy riding an old-timey bike in the presence of a portrait of an old guy, which leads to the guy being transported back in time.  It's really strange, and didn't seem to make clear sense.

    The third story is probably my favorite of them.  A guy brings a chunk of a tree into the house as decoration, and the tree doesn't seem to get along with his wife (who was played by Joan Collins).  The last story involves a guy going through a voodoo (?) ritual that involves killing a virgin and serving her flesh to an unknowing luau party.

    Logically, the last story should be the strongest one, but it felt a little dull.

    According to wiki, this is not an Amicus production, it's just very similar because of the format, and since Donald Pleasence is in it.

13 - Dr. Terror's House of Horrors

    This silly name is actually an older Amicus production.  A horror anthology from 1965, it's very tame by modern standards.  No nudity, a minimum of blood.  A small amount of off-screen violence.

There are a few things that are noteworthy.  The cast includes Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Donald Sutherland, as well as Michael Gough, the guy who played Alfred in the Tim Burton Batman movies.  The stories vary in quality.  I lean toward the second story, the Creeping Vine, and the fourth story, Disembodied Hand.  The rest of them are pleasant enough, but not noteworthy.  It's nice to have an anthology movie that moves as fast as this one does.  With five stories, plus a framing device, the whole thing moves very quickly.