Saturday, February 14, 2015

Tales of the Dead: Grim Stories of Curses, Horror and Gore (2011)

A group of friends gather for a small Halloween party, smoke pot, drink and tell scary stories.  It appears the filmmakers used the on camera mic because the audio is often hard to hear and the ambient noise is sometimes distracting. Note to anyone making a film - if one of your characters is wearing a chain, the sound will drive the viewer crazy listening to it clink.

The party is what ties together the pieces of this anthology. So get ready to see a stationary shot of a group of people sitting on the floor, having hard to hear conversations that you aren't all that interested in.  It's like watching your friends home movies of a fairly sedate party that you didn't attend.

The four segments of the anthology are:

  • Less is More - a miserable woman is obsessed with amputation which is causing problems with her husband
  • Wolf Cry - a lazy teen obsessed with horror movies is justifiably nagged by his mother and seems to be having trouble telling reality from fantasy.
  • Penance - a detective investigates a series of murders
  • Missing - a group of friends investigates a curse on Cromwell Street

At times it gets confusing because some of the people at the party are also in the individual stories.  It's a very low budget movie by amateurs.  I got this one on a 12 pack of movies from Millcreek.  So  I knew it wasn't going to be anything great. There isn't really anything here to recommend it, but it's not the worst thing I've ever seen.

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