Shock Chamber

A nosy reporter interviews the mother of grown identical quadruplets, after one of them is killed. She tells three tepid tales of murder and mayhem, explaining that her son was "no good" and so were the other three.

In "Symbol of Victory," Ron is a college student infatuated with his father's secretary,. He buys a love elixir from a door-to-door alchemist (!) who looks like Billy Joel. The potion works for about a week, and the price of the next batch goes up a thousand bucks. Just before Linda dies mysteriously, she tells Ron that she and the alchemist schemed to bilk Ron's father out of a lot of money. The tale ends with a series of double crosses.

In the most original of the three stories, "Country Hospitality," Cameron stops for gas at a backwoods fillin' station and is tempted to stick around for a meal with Blanche, waitress at the nearby diner. She poisons him and, with the help of her husband and some guy named Buford, bury the body and ditch the car. But they find $200,000 in the car. Greed and murder follow.

The final tale, "The Injection," is also concerned with purloined money and double crosses. This one covers very familiar ground, as a man fakes his own death so a best friend can collect a hefty life insurance policy.

SHOCK CHAMBER offers a better framing story than I've seen in other anthologies, but the individual episodes cover the same thematic ground and wore me down. Although the first tale is well-acted, the remaining characterizations are soap-opera caliber. Intended as a cerebral horror movie, SHOCK CHAMBER is bloodless in more ways than one.

It was shot on video in a very snowy part of Canada.