Low-budget Spanish horror anthology Maniac Tales stars Enrique Arce as homeless illegal Mexican immigrant Juan, who is given the opportunity to evade the police by Mr. Travis (Carlos Reig-Plaza) from the local shelter, who offers him a job as doorman in an old apartment building, home to several eccentric people.
Juan learns that one of the occupants was a TV writer, creator of the hit show Maniac Tales, who went missing before she could deliver the final script for the next series. A reward is being offered to anyone who finds the script and so Juan searches the woman's apartment. While there, he watches the previous episodes of the show...
Tale one is The Skull of Desires, a monkey's paw style story of wish fulfillment that goes awry. This one is spoilt by the strong accent of one of the actors (I couldn't understand what he was saying) and the fact that the reanimated, two-year-old corpse of a girl doesn't look like she's been dead that long.
Tale two is Cimbelin, in which a young girl helps her father to hunt for the man who killed her sister. This one is almost unwatchable thanks to the really bad filter that is applied to the live action footage, the aim presumably for it to look like animation (like A Scanner Darkly). Instead, it just looks cheap and nasty.
Tale three is The Perfect Moment: a man tries to interest his date in a business proposition but gets more than he bargained for. This one has a wafer-thin plot, but is the most twisted of the bunch, making it my favourite.
Tale four is The Visit, in which a man visits a religious woman to try and convince her to sell her property for development. While there, he discovers that the woman is keeping a young girl chained in the basement. He succeeds in freeing the girl, but she turns out to be a monster (a crap CGI demon). Not a great story but it does manage to deliver a spot of gore.
Between watching these episodes, Juan investigates the building, learns more about the strange people living there, and becomes concerned that he is being prevented to leave by Mr. Travis. Juan is right to be suspicous, for Travis has plans for the doorman to become the star of his very own Maniac Tale...
As anthologies go, this one is fairly weak, more miss than hit. The Spanish cast, speaking English, are often hard to understand, and I would have preferred them to have delivered their lines in their native language with subtitles. And that filter... ugh!
3.5/10, generously rounded up to 4 for IMDb.
