a horror anthology
the strange theater It features seven directors, nine screenwriters, and nineteen people with various production credits to their names. It’s a horror anthology, you see, made up of six shorts and a wraparound segment. As a collective whole, it’s a bit like a hideous lab monster sewn together from spare parts by people with no skills in science, medicine, or even basic sewing. As individual stories, the parts are rotten, as if they’ve been ripped from subjects dead several months ago. Only one piece is a fresh specimen; is an honest, thought-provoking and surprisingly moving little story that addresses the darker aspects of life with dignity. It’s the only segment with an emotional core, so I consider it the heart of the film: ripped from the body of a good person and beautifully preserved in a glass jar.
The framing segments, directed by Jeremy Kasten, build up like live theatrical performances in an abandoned theater. The only apparent audience member is a disturbed young woman (Virginia Newcomb), who lives across the street in an apartment bedroom with tattered and cut theater paraphernalia plastered to the walls. On stage are a number of actors covered in unnatural makeup; They are made to look like automata, and their static movements are enhanced with a host of mechanical sound effects. The ringmaster (Udo Kier), whose narrations are a series of meaningless musings about stories and storytellers, takes on a more natural look as the shorts progress. The young woman in the audience, meanwhile, becomes less and less natural in appearance. Visually creative as they may be, the immersive segments fail to make a proper connection between the individual stories and exist primarily to be gawked at.
Shorts 1: The mother of toads, directed by Richard Stanley. Martin (Shane Woodward) and Karina (Victoria Maurette) are a young couple on vacation in France. Karina buys a pair of pentagram earrings from a sinister old woman (Catriona MacColl), who piques Martin’s interest when she claims to possess a copy of the pentagram. necronomicon. Karina, disinterested, goes to a spa. Martin travels into the country to the old woman’s house, which looks more like a castle than you’d see on a tour of the historical monuments. I can’t understand the rest of the segment, except to say that there is a sex scene, some grotesque physical transformations, and a lot of toads.
Shorts 2: I love youDirected by Buddy Giovinazzo. In Berlin (a wasted place since all the characters speak English), a French woman named Mo (Suzan Anbeh) decides to leave her German boyfriend of hers, Axel (Andre Hennicke). She has more to do with the fact that he is obsessive and paranoid; He simply enjoys being unfaithful. She explains this to him during a calm and candid conversation that is not only overly long-winded but also hilarious and unconvincing. What are we going to make of the fact that, at two points in the segment, Axel wakes up on his bathroom floor with a gaping wound on his hand and blood everywhere?
Shorts 3: Wet dreamsDirected by Tom Savini. Here’s a horrifying Freudian segment that fools the audience by endlessly blurring the line between reality and dreams. An abusive and unfaithful husband named Donnie (James Gill) is seeing a psychologist (Savini) for his recurring nightmares. In one, his wife’s vagina is a crab monster. In the other, she is served his penis for breakfast. Too many moments are where Donnie wakes up screaming, making it impossible to keep track of his dream states. The final scene, which unfairly reversed everything I thought I had learned, begins with his wife (Debbie Rochon) waking up from a nightmare.
Shorts 4: The accident, directed by Douglas Buck. This is the only good segment of the entire movie. It’s so good, in fact, that it’s a miracle anyone even thought it belonged in this movie. It’s the heart I mentioned before. It deals with an unpleasant subject, and yet it is not a horror story; it’s simply about a mother (Lena Kleine) explaining to her young daughter (Melodie Simard) about death. It is intercut between her lying in bed and the scene of an accident, in which the girl witnesses the death of a motorcyclist and a deer on a stretch of road. The girl is not disturbed, but she wants to understand what it means. The mother feeds her daughter age-appropriate explanations, aware that certain things cannot really be explained.
Shorts 5: vision spots, directed by Karim Hussain. A woman known as The Writer (Kaniehtiio Horn) seeks out female transients and drug addicts, kills them, and extracts fluid from one of her eyeballs. She then injects that fluid into her own eye and is flooded with the victims’ memories of her, which she then writes down in a single-use notebook. Her house, a dirty storage room, has lots and lots of these notebooks, which must make her one of the most prolific serial killers in history. She then sees a pregnant woman and wonders what the unborn see. Do I need to describe this more?
Shorts 6: sweetsDirected by David Gregorio. Here’s a segment so bizarre, it appears to have been transplanted from an alternate universe. It begins as a relationship drama, in which an emotionless woman (Lindsay Goranson) grabs a melting ice cream cone while her whimpering boyfriend (Guilford Adams) takes a piece of candy, which shatters into a gooey mess on her floor. . Turned into food porn, the woman dresses like a fashion show reject and goes to a restaurant that looks more like an art gallery. A band plays as people are served plates of nondescript food, which they pick up and greedily stuff into their mouths. Inexplicably, it turns into a gorefest, someone gets torn apart before being eaten by the voracious patrons. This segment alone proves that the strange theater is a fitting title indeed. I feel bad for Douglas Buck. His short deserved so much more than being a segment in some horrible anthology.
