A lot of people say the short story is the essence of horror, and they’ve got a lot of evidence on their side. Unfortunately, the attempts to transfer the short story format to film, in the form of “anthology” movies, haven’t proved effective. The latest misfire of this type that I have seen is a movie called Trapped Ashes, which has a number of segments directed by well-known persons such as Ken Russell, Joe Dante, Monte Hellman, and Sean Cunningham.
A small group of tourists are on a golf-cart tour of an old movie studio, when they go to a house on the lot where a famous horror movie was filmed (pretty much the house from Psycho on the Universal lot). Once inside, they can’t get out, and the ancient diminutive guide suggests the best thing for them to do is to each tell a story about some horrible event that has happened in their lives. I know what you would do in the same circumstances. Strangle the little bastard and use his stiffened corpse as a battering ram to break out. So would I. But the dim travelers decide to humor him.
The starlet of the group tells the first story. Stuck at a career standstill, she decided to get breast augmentation, from a surgeon who used corpse meat instead of silicone. Uh huh. The increased breastage gives her career a lift, but there’s a catch: her new tits have to drink blood to survive. Really. I couldn’t make this up if I tried. Each nipple has a little mouth in it that latches on to someone and sucks their blood. Rather than run screaming from her vampiric boobies, her co-star seems into it. This was directed by Ken Russell, who seems to have some sort of nipple fetish. (He also appears in semi-drag with blood-sucking teats of his own, along with a couple other old guys)
After that, we segue into very long and tedious stories about a woman seduced by a corpse, a girl was “twin” was the tapeworm her mother had while the girl was in the womb (!), and a director who had an affair with his best friend’s girl, who seemed evil in a poorly defined way. Then the movie ends in a twist we all saw coming.
Perhaps this is what they call “bizarre”. If so, I’m not much of a fan.
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4 comments:
Wow, it's pretty criminal that a line-up like this can't produce something at least half decent.
But now that I know that it has VAMPIRIC BOOBIES, well it sounds like a "must see" to me :)
I can almost guarantee you've never seen anything quite like it.
I tend to seek these out, though I honestly haven't seen a good one since Tales from the Hood.
I always anticipate them as well, figuring 5 stories, at least one or two will be good. Shows how little I know.
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