A pair of wise-cracking movie critics present four horror sci-fi shorts.
Dr. Dobermind sees a young girl suffering from scary hallucinations after an encounter with a creepy taxidermist at a museum. The story for this one is fairly weak and ends without a satisfactory resolution. Look out for the bit clearly inspired by the mirror scene from Poltergeist. Amazingly, director Jonathan Mostow went on to make U-571 and Terminator 3.
Illegal Alien is a parody of Ridley Scott's Alien. The humour isn't great (the front of the spaceship is shaped like a nose - the ship's name.... The Nostrilomo), but the makers have to be applauded for even attempting to reproduce the style and atmosphere of Scott's film on an extremely low budget.
In Night Fright, a horror-loving boy who is afraid of the dark finds a monster lurking in his bedroom, but his father won't believe him. The monster eats the dad, and the boy's older brother, but the whole thing turns out to be a dream - or was it? This is predictable stuff, but still quite fun. One scene had me checking to see if the director was Victor Salva. It wasn't.
The final story is The Thing In The Basement, in which some beer-swilling buddies have their poker night interrupted by an alien creature. This one is very silly, but probably the most enjoyable of the bunch, with monster make-up by John Carl Buechler and a smattering of gore.
To be honest, all four stories are watchable - it's the wraparound nonsense involving the film critics that really tests one's patience.
4.5/10, rounded down to 4 for those critics!
