Review – Amityville Apartment

Wow, the housing market has gotten so bad that even Satan is stuck renting. Obviously the only reason I watched this piece of camcorder crap was so I could make that joke in this review. See if desperate

Review – Creepypasta

Even for this particular sub-genre, the entries in this anthology are boring beyond belief. Almost every one of these semi-related video shorts start with an innocuous setting and end with someone being grabbed by a monster without so much as a “Who’s got my golden arm?” See if desperate

Review – American Nightmares

Rusty Cundieff doesn’t make it all the way back up to what he did with Tales from the Hood, but at least he’s playing in the same ballpark. This one features seven shorts, which means that the stories spend less time on buildup and character development, cutting more directly to the punchlines. The only part I genuinely didn’t like was the bracket, as I felt it made little sense and seriously under-used Nichelle Nichols. Even this late in her career, she was capable of doing so much more than just sitting there looking vaguely confused by Danny Trejo. Otherwise if they make a series out of this I will definitely be back for the sequels. Mildly amusing

Review – Very Frightening Tales

So this is where D listers go to bury their careers. Eric Roberts, Sally Struthers, Martin Sheen’s brother, all somehow got roped into appearing in YouTube-worthy shorts mashed together into this sad excuse for a horror anthology piece. This time around I can’t even dish out an E for effort. The writing, directing and acting are all too terrible. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Tales from the Hood 3

This one lies somewhere between the excellence of the first one and the cheapness of the second. The bracket doesn’t amount to much, yet another waste of Tony Todd’s talent. But the four main stories are entertaining enough and more socially aware than the average low budget horror anthology. Mildly amusing

Review – Fun and Fancy Free

Emerging from its wartime loss of materials and animators, Disney re-enters the realm of theatrical-release by combining two shorter productions that were originally both supposed to be feature length. The first, “Bongo,” marks one of the rare occasions the studio ever paid royalties to the author of a source story. Alas, Sinclair Lewis’s dumb story about a bear who escapes from a circus rattles on for quite some time without ever supplying enough entertainment to justify its existence. The second half – “Mickey and the Beanstalk” – features a familiar story and stars a trio of familiar characters. Even so, it takes some strange twists (why does the giant have to be a shapeshifter in addition to being huge?). And it gets interrupted frequently by the live-action comedy stylings of Edgar Bergen and his dummies. The result is more nostalgic than it is entertaining. Mildly amusing

Review – The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

Two familiar tales get the late-1940s Disney treatment. The opening bit from The Wind in the Willows tells the anthropomorphic animal story of a rich a-hole who loses everything due to his own folly, imperils his friends and learns nothing from the experience. At least it’s narrated by Basil Rathbone. The second half is better, at least when it finally gets around to the part of the story with the Headless Horseman. Both bits relied heavily on physical comedy, making this seem less like a Disney approach to literary adaptation and more like the work being done by the rival Warner Brothers animation studio at the time. Mildly amusing

Review – Hellarious

For the last five minutes or so I’ve been trying to come up with a Hell-related pun more apt than the title. No luck, so I’ll cut straight to the review. Here we have seven mostly terrible attempts at horror humor. The first story was somewhat amusing (and reminded me of a joke from Matinee). But the rest fell flat for one reason or another. See if desperate

Review – The Mortuary Collection

This certainly isn’t the best horror anthology I’ve ever seen, but it’s far from the worst. Of course at this point I’m grateful for anything in this realm that’s an actual, intentional movie rather than a weakly-packaged Youtube playlist. Yeah, the stories are a little on the dumb side. But the production values were reasonably good, the acting was fine, and the bracket had a fun twist at the end. Mildly amusing

Review – Nightmare Cinema

I appreciated one thing about this anthology set: characters from the individual stories appeared in the bracket. Lately I’ve seen enough anthologies that turned out to be little more than Youtube shorts cobbled together on the cheap. At least this wasn’t that. The chapters were unmemorable, and I could have done without Mickey Rourke in the wrap-around. But I’ve seen worse. Mildly amusing

Review – Galaxy of Horrors

An astronaut trapped in cryogenic suspension finds out the hard way what happens when you type “sci fi horror” into a Youtube search and then leave it on autoplay. See if desperate

Review – Body Bags

This experience taught me a couple of things about my memory. First, I thought I’d already reviewed this movie long ago. I must have seen it before I started writing reviews, because this was definitely a re-watch. And second, I recalled only the middle entry in this three-story set. That’s because the memorable one was at least creative, however strange. The first and third were trips along well-travelled roads. John Carpenter steps out from behind the camera to play the host for the bracket. Mildly amusing

Review – Dreadtime Stories

Here’s a new Zen koan: how can you edit a movie without watching it? Poorly shot and poorly put together - even for a guys-with-a-camcorder production - this is a textbook case on how not to make a movie. Community theatre actors and college theatre majors (a.k.a. community theatre actors to be) chew their way through trite tales of terror supposedly from an ancient book. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Sanitarium (2013)

This anthology piece – bracketed with some mental hospital filler featuring Malcolm McDowell – proves to be highly predictable. That’s at least in part because the first segment features an artist with an insane fixation on the dolls he creates (when was the last time you saw something original done with evil dolls?) and the second is uncomfortably close to the abusive-parent-versus-imaginary-monster bit from Tales from the Hood (not that the twist was exactly new even back in 1995). The trio finishes up with a guy-in-a-bomb-shelter plot that swiftly wears out its welcome. Though the technical quality is reasonably good, the cliché-ridden script kills the picture. See if desperate

Review – POE: Project of Evil

Of course POE could also stand for Piece of Excrement. Edgar Allen Poe’s poems and short stories are used as vague excuses to generate brain-dead torture porn. The result is an insult not only to Poe but to audience members in general. And though I concede that the actors speak English better than I speak Italian, it’s a near thing. Even if it hurt rentals, they should have stuck to their native tongue and subtitled it. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Twisted Tales

Screenwriter Tom Holland has a vaguely impressive list of credits, including the original Fright Night and the first Chucky movie. But if this mess is any indication, at some point he must have suffered some kind of Gary-Busey-esque brain injury. The IMDb notes are vague, but I’m guessing these vignettes were originally produced for web distribution and only later strung together into a DVD. I was somewhat taken with the acting, because it’s rare to see professional actors (including a few recognizable faces) so freely mixed with total amateurs who can barely deliver their lines. The scripts, on the other hand, are uniformly dreadful. The “Pizza Guy” segment was particularly excruciating, though that may just have been because it lasted longer than most of the others. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – All Hallows’ Eve

The advantage to anthology pieces is that if you hate one of the segments, at least it will be over in less-than-feature-length time. But then if all three segments and the bracket are amateurish, grainy gorefests, the experience is pretty much the same as watching a single, feature-length piece of crap. If you’re scared of clowns, this should terrify you at least as much as an episode of Howdy Doody. Otherwise the only way you’ll get any joy out of the experience is if you’re excited by cheap gore and screaming women. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Chilling Visions

I was pleasantly surprised by one aspect of this anthology piece: all five stories were actually vaguely linked. I expected this to be another nearly-random assemblage of shorts gleaned from an amateur horror short contest. They even built a loose structure around the five senses, devoting one tale to each. However, the lot might have been improved a jot by following traditional anthology structure: best story last, second best story first, and the mid-packers in between. Because if they thought they were doing that here, the drastically over-estimated the appeal of the show stopper at the end. Still, I’ve seen worse. Mildly amusing

Review – The ABCs of Death

The good thing about horror anthologies is that bad segments tend to end quickly, giving their companions a chance to re-win the audience. But when the majority of the stories are genuinely awful, they overpower the good stuff. This set sports 26 entries, one for each letter of the alphabet. The first two got the evening off on the right foot, but after that it dived straight downhill. By the end I’d experienced way too many suffering animals, graphic toilet explorations and the like to be able to appreciate the diamonds buried in the shit. Verdict: wish I’d skipped it.

Review – Spooks and Creeps

I used to hate short subject filmmaking, which generally struck me as the realm of talentless amateurs. But now thanks to the tech revolution that’s opened feature-length work to talentless amateurs, shorts no longer seem that bad to me. At least someone with no clue can demonstrate his lack in 10 minutes rather than dragging it out to 90 and beyond. This disc is a collection of six unrelated horror stories without so much as a bracket. Two or three of them manage some cleverness, and familiar faces here and there don’t exactly hurt. Overall, however, I walked away with an overwhelming sense of “meh.” Mildly amusing