Always on the lookout for a decent horror anthology that I haven't seen, I ran across this title somewhere and decided to give it 10 minutes to win me over. After 10 minutes, it was obvious that, unlike so many excretable horror anthologies out there, that this was a professional and talented production, so I kept watching.
First things first. The good: as I noted, this was pretty well-made. I don't know what the budget was (though the alphabetical list of thanks to people who helped at the end of the movie suggests it was basically a crowdfunded indie project), but whatever it was, the people behind the movie made good use of it. It wasn't perfect but clearly a cut above the average amateur affair. Also good: the writing was...pretty decent. Some of the dialogue was a bit clunky, but nothing distractingly so. The framing segments were okay, if a bit too hammy on occasion. One of the segments stood out from the rest, "Splinter," and I do appreciate the attempts to get in actual horror without going for upbeat endings in the other segments.
Inevitably, some shorts in horror anthologies will better than others. This is not to say any of them were *bad*, as such. They all had decent elements of horror, but only one of them, "Splinter." seem to really embrace true horror throughout. The others relied on bringing the horror in or near the very end, which presented a problem due to my main complaint here...the extent of unnecessary filler. The run-time of almost 2.5 hours elides into this criticism. The shorts involved, while clearly done with an eye toward good cinema, were stretched out far too long. The stories and their resolutions didn't rate so much filler, especially given how simple and straightforward they were and how little horror they actually had for most of their narratives.
Being well-made, and being that, even with my above criticism of the segments, it rates a solid 7 for me. Good enough that I've put the original movie (the one being returned to in the title here) in my queue to watch sometime soon.
