Rating: D-
Dir: Sergio Guerra et al
Star: Hannah Reese, Sara D’Olivier, Hannah Endicott-Douglas, Bo Von Bryning Månsson
I don’t demand much from a horror anthology. No matter how terrible a segment might be, you know there will be another one along, typically in fifteen or twenty minutes. So you’re not particularly committing to anything. But if there’s one thing I do require, it’s basic narrative coherence. Just because there is less time with which to work, doesn’t mean you get to forget about this. You still need to have a beginning, a middle and at least some effort to wrap things up. Sadly, the people involved here seem to have missed the memo. Every single segment here feels like it’s a chunk extracted from a larger narrative, and is rendered meaningless in the process. I kept hoping, albeit with persistently less belief, somebody would actually tell a proper story. Zero out of six there.
Let me just discuss one example in detail, the opening segment, Murder Ballad. A woman (Reese) is at home, tending to her husband, shot in the commission of some crime. A priest shows up at the door muttering vague threats and stuff about the Russians coming. She stabs her husband in the forehead after he has slapped her around a bit. He’s a bit reluctant to die. That is more or less it. The short is almost pathologically averse to answering simple questions – like, I dunno, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON. This creates the template for what is to follow. The second, Hollow Peak, has a hotel which seems to harvest guests’ body parts. An employee helps one escape… I guess?
It illustrates another common flaw: a potentially interesting premise, which goes nowhere, is a phrase I could apply to almost every section. The next, To Enter You Must, might come closest to actually working, though still comes up short. Phoebe (D’Olivier) is harvesting human sacrifices for a group of cloaked figures, in exchange for… Well, guess what? We never find out, exactly. They demand a specific victim, which Phoebe rejects – at least initially. It may not go anywhere satisfying, but the road to nowhere is bearable. See elements such as Phoebe taking the bus to her masters, carrying with her a severed head in a burlap sack. It’s miles better than Decoyed or Eilid & Damh, segments which are just entirely impenetrable in their plot or point.
We finish, after a mercifully brief eighty-two minutes, with Scarlet Vultures. A woman discovers that mixing blood into her cooking makes it delicious and popular. There are a number of interesting directions this might have gone. You should not be surprised to learn, the segment takes none of them. Instead we end up with human sacrifice (top), from a cult whose idea of decor is inspired by the bachelor pad belonging to a moderately unhip thirty-something wannabe playboy. Somehow, this anthology was followed by Built 2 Kill in 2023. Rarely has a title been struck from my potential watch-list with such rapidity or enthusiasm.