I watch a fair amount of horror anthologies. In fact, I just commented in one review that nobody expects the wrap-around stories linking the short films together to be any good. So, naturally, the very next one I watched was amazing.
The basic premise is there is a TV show from hell streaming around the world trying to suck up souls. Everything about it is just great. You have a witty, charismatic host (notable genre actress Hannah Fierman, who also did some writing, directing and producing), super crazy hellacious commercials that are some of the best bits, and cameos from famous horror actors aplenty. It was just great fun. The short films themselves were a little bit more hit or miss, though.
The first one, "Hellevangelist," takes the cliched story of a Christian televangelist fleecing his flock but keeps it fresh by tackling it from a slightly different angle.
The second, "Jasper," is all about a woman who keeps the family legacy of creating a show about a cartoon cat character alive after her father's death. The only problem is that the cat is real and not so concerned about keeping families alive. Yes, the CGI is not the best, but the details are good, the actresses are great, and it's just goofy fun.
Then we have "Clean UR Room," which was a bit too long for its very basic premise (a pile of dirty laundry takes on a life of its own) but still sort of goofy and sort of fun.
"Heroes of Time" takes the extreme cliche about an online fantasy world becoming reality (seriously, do we have any film with this setting that doesn't do this?) but does it with a few new touches. The people playing the game certainly do a good job of representing the diverse range of personalities drawn to this entertainment. The graphics of the online world are very much like that sort of game would really look, unlike most of the lame LARP tales we've gotten. It seems like it would have worked better in a different anthology, though.
The last is "Gut Cruncher." A coach decides to teach some slacker students a lesson by having them wrestle a demon for extra credit. Yeah, so it's not Shakespeare, just go with it. One boy seems like Where's Waldo come to life, but I couldn't tell if the others were also parodies of famous characters. The coach is your basic high school phys-ed teacher and then some. Gut Cruncher himself is big and blue and likes maiming people and eating energy bars. You even get demon cheerleaders. It's just stupid fun, but way more entertaining than it has any right to be base upon its description.
I honestly thought that this was probably the best horror anthology film I've seen in many years. It definitely leans more into the comedy side of horror comedy, though. It makes me curious about the TV show "Dead by Midnight (11pm Central)," which is by many of the same people but appears to have completely different stories. If I find an easy way to check it out, i will.
