Fantasia 2020: 'The Mortuary Collection' Movie Review

Writer/director Ryan Spindell’s The Mortuary Collection has the honor of being the third anthology (or at least anthology adjacent) film I’ve watched at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival that places stories and the craft of storytelling front and center in the narrative. (The others being The Oak Room and Undergods.) 

'Ghost Stories' (2017) Movie Review

Though it takes a while to really find it’s footing, when it does, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s horror anthology, Ghost Stories, lives up to the hype it gathered on the festival circuit. The film plays with genre tricks and tropes, with varying degrees of success, but when the filmmakers finally break free, it builds into a clever and inventive crescendo.

'V/H/S' Movie Review

 

“V/H/S” is a weird movie because I enjoy it much more in retrospect than I did sitting in the theater. There are some elements that will delight horror fans, but there are moments of extreme frustration as well. “V/H/S” is another in the line of recent horror anthology films, and features a who’s who of hot young independent horror directors. Radio Silence, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, and Joe Swanberg all take a turn at the helm. The individual pieces of “V/H/S” are, for the most part, solid standalone horror shorts, and many of them have great, stand out elements. You will have to have a high tolerance for douche bags to watch “V/H/S”, but you’ll enjoy watching most of the characters die. How the pieces of the puzzle come together, or in this case, how they don’t, is the central problem with the film.

'The Theatre Bizarre' Movie Review

Horror anthologies are a hit and miss affair. While some installments succeed wildly, others invariably fall flat on their face. “The Theatre Bizarre”, the latest in a long and distinguished line of these films, is very much in this category. Moments of near greatness exist right along side segments where you’re counting the seconds until it ends. That’s also part of the fun of anthologies. There’s a sense of giddy mayhem when something clicks and comes together. It gets in, does its thing, and gets the hell out without wasting any time. Shorts can be efficient little buggers from time to time. And even when things don’t work, the time commitment is minor.