Rating: 4.5/5
A man trapped in a recurring dream, or believes it so, drives up to a farmhouse and knows everyone in a room full of strangers. Most everyone is into it save a psychoanalyst who can recall any number of theories for his experience
The set up serves as the framing device for an anthology in which characters tell stories to convince the psychoanalyst of the supernatural or uncanny
The Hearse Driver ***** A man hospitalized after a race car crash experiences a premonition, witnessing a hearse driver just outside the hospital waiting for him. After leaving the hospital, he recognizes the bus driver as the man driving the hearse and does not take the bus. He then witnesses the bus crash
The horse-drawn hearse, all in black, with black horses, is spooky!
Feels a lot like a mini Twilight Zone episode
The Christmas Party ** A young girl attends a lavish party where they play a variation of hide and seek called sardines, and she goes to hide. The first boy to find her looks to the camera, eyes wide, and says, “Believe it or not, this house is haunted,” so they wander off into the house. The house becomes progressively more labyrinthine and dilapidated, her becoming separated from the boy, and she comes across a crying little boy
When she returns to the party to report the boy, she learns that he is the ghost mentioned above
- The house looks cool; it twists around so much that you get lost with the character
- She kisses the little boy on the cheeks a whole lot… felt weird
The Haunted Mirror ***.5 A woman buys a mirror, and guess what? It’s haunted. Her husband hangs it up in his bedroom and immediately begins to see images that aren’t there in real life — a home with a burning fire. Though he tries to shake the image, it stays affixed with the mirror frame
The woman offers to take it back, but he refuses, insisting he’s the problem, not the mirror. The mirror eventually convinces him that his wife is cheating and that he needs to kill her, so she shatters it
Took me a while to remember that married folks used to have separate bedrooms
This one’s a little dull because the image in the mirror doesn’t change, and it takes multiple scenes before the story progresses. Still, unnerving!
The Golfer’s Story **.5 Two men play a golf game to choose who gets to date a woman with whom they’re both in love — she agrees to these terms. One fellow seems to have cheated to win but the other cannot prove it. The loser walks off into the water feature and drowns
The ghost of the loser messes with the other dude’s golf game, calling him a cheater and moving his ball. An angel can prove the winner cheated, and he must give up the woman… but more heinously, give up golf!!
It goes on from there, but I went in and out
It’s meant to be funny, but it doesn’t work for me
The Ventriloquist’s Dummy ***** The psychiatrist interviews a criminal ventriloquist to determine his sanity, but he won’t talk without Hugo, his ventriloquist dummy. So instead he reads eyewitness testimony from someone who have run into the ventriloquist
He tells of the dummy seeming to rebel against the ventriloquist mid-show, much to the audience’s confusion and the ventriloquist’s frustration. The dummy tries to jump ship and work with a different ventriloquist
The dummy drives the ventriloquist to drink, thinking the eyewitness is trying to steal the dummy. The testimony ends with the ventriloquist shooting the eyewitness
The police resolve to give the ventriloquist back his dummy, but the ventriloquist smashes its head in
- The idea of paying to see a puppet show makes me want to scream
- When the puppet bites the ventriloquist and draws blood, I gasped
- “On the water wagon” for sobriety. I’ve only heard on or off the wagon, interesting
Framing Story: ***** After the stories, a prediction made by the trapped man comes true. The trapped man kills another man, compelled by something unknown. The man’s reality splinters as he runs through the other stories, trying to hide, but the nightmare draws him out
It’s all so British, everyone sitting back and enjoying the discussion, talking in rationalist terms
The ending is so crazy and intense!
Overall, one of the best anthology movies with multiple directors I’ve seen