Tag Archives: anthology

Southbound

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The most recent [new] podcast movie was Southbound, a mix of anthology and psycho killer… which tracks, yeah. There’s this DJ being creepy on the radio while five stories play out along the same highway, in sequential, minimally overlapping order. I liked this conceit exactly once, as that was the time the interaction was direct, instead of incredibly indirect, nay, practically forced.

So anyway, the stories are as follows:

  1. Two blood- and regret-covered men are forced to face their demons, literal and metaphorical alike.
  2. A lady rock band on tour breaks down, and gets the wrong kind of help.
  3. A dude hits and tries to save a pedestrian, more or less in Silent Hill.
  4. A dude tries to rescue his sister from monstertown.
  5. A family is attacked by strangers.

Aside from the tenuous linear timeline that connects these stories, an even more disappointing facet of the movie is that the latter two stories don’t really involve anyone driving down a highway. If you cannot maintain the theme of your anthology for more than three-fifths of the movie, that is a pretty bad compromise someone made along the way.

…okay, I’m going to stop now, because I have some regrets about what just happened. Anyway, the first and last stories did not make a lick of sense, I think mostly by virtue of not being written as though someone would ever need them to, but the other three ranged from decent to pretty darn good. It’s just the wrapper that is annoying me here.

The Mortuary Collection

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Sometimes movies are extremely basic, but in a good way, so you have fun, which in turn makes it almost a bad way after all, because at least if it weren’t fun you’d have something negative to say instead of practically nothing at all. Enter The Mortuary Collection, in which Clancy Brown runs a, you know, mortuary, while wearing what seemed to me to be an unnecessary amount of old guy makeup. He looked 60 when he was 20, and if he still only looks 60 now, how old does a mortician need to look?

Anyway, this blonde girl shows up in response to the help wanted sign right after a child’s funeral, and they discuss her qualifications for the job, which for some reason means he starts telling implausible morality plays about the ways denizens of the town of Raven’s Hollow (where the mortuary resides) have died. Which is to say: anthology movie! …if the title didn’t give that away already, I mean.

The stories themselves were decent if mostly predictable, and the wrapper story was pretty good as well, even if the ending was a bit inexplicable. Also, exploding penis, which is not a thing you see every day.

Hood of Horror

I have such a headache right now. I’m going to assume that it’s from reviewing too much too fast, and wrap this up as quick as I can. Assisting me in that task is our final movie of the festival, Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror. Because, well, it really wasn’t that good. Ironically, the framing device was the best part of the picture. Well, that and the rapping. When I think about, um, Snoop’s production acumen and choice of projects, I keep coming to the same conclusion: he’s a pretty good rapper. (And okay, like a lot of rappers, a pretty good actor too.)

So yeah, framing device good. Unfortunately, what it framed was several substandard streets-themed short stories you might find in Tales from the Cryzypt. In the first, a local girl learns an important lesson about the applications of power as they relate to tagging. Despite some topless hos, it was godawful. Most noteworthy, the terrible acting from the young version of Posie. In the second, a spoiled heir takes over the tenement where his father’s army buddies lived, and starts trying to drive them out. Eventually, they get fed up and turn the tables on him. This one wasn’t so bad, but it was also a ripoff of one of those old Tales from the Darkside or Amazing Stories or some such. In the third, a rap artist promises to be a good guy if God will only give him a big break. Predictably, he fails to fulfill his end of the bargain. I wonder if he’ll get some kind of comeuppance?

Oh, well. At least it had buckets of blood and gore to make up for a small fraction of the rest of the badness. Oh, and Billy Dee Williams. He makes everything better.