For my spooky season sins, last week I watched several horror movies, leaning heavily towards horror anthology movies. It…didn’t go great…
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- V/H/S/Beyond was obviously the most polished and modern-looking of the bunch, and yet I may have found it the least memorable. Of the five main stories, I think the last one, “Stowaway,” is maybe the strongest, but I think it’s actually the central found-footage conceit of the series that lets it down in the end, and doesn’t let the segment explore its own ideas or come together as cohesively as it might have otherwise.
- The Uncanny is just kind of dumb. The first segment is maybe the strongest, while the final has a hammy Donald Pleasance, but none of it is especially interesting, much less scary.
- Tales That Witness Madness isn’t remarkably bad, but neither is it remarkably good. There are a couple of very confusing segments—the weird time travel of “Penny Farthing,” for example—and a questionable, almost racist concluding one, and the movie as a whole largely squanders its game cast. But I’ve seen worse.
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- Encounter with the Unknown is worse. The best the movie can boast is the ten minutes it convinced Rod Serling to devote to some voiceover. These are three very creaky tales not told particularly well on a shoestring budget, padded beyond all reason and particularly dull.
- Hallowarrior is not exactly a fun movie, which is a problem because sometimes it’s very much trying to be just that. It’s a weird mix of The Walking Dead, The Strangers, and Home Alone, and some of that mix works, thanks to a pretty good cast and a simple location, but not all of it does.
- Castle of Blood feels like it has a more complicated plot than it does. But it has a creepy, ghost-filled castle, and enough Italian Gothic horror to keep you entertained.
Luckily, I also rewatched Alien—which, y’know, never pass up an opportunity to do that—and the really fun Happy Death Day.