Horror anthologies can be hard to rate, because you need to come up with a score that sums up the entire film and not just the individual segments. When this was mostly over I was ready to just give it up and rate the whole thing as two stars out of ten. It's not that all the individual pieces were all that bad, but that the bad ones really dragged the overall experience down. Thankfully for the film, I decided to wait for the last segment. It was kind of dumb, but in a fun and lovable Scooby Doo/original Godzilla/Hallmark Cards kind of way that was enjoyable. It was definitely the best of the segments. That made me reassess the rest of it. The first bit is just dire no matter how you look at it, though. It starts with a frenetic, toxic masculinity overload that was more appropriate for an extreme! Caffeine soft drink commercial than a movie,. Thankfully then it shifts to two film-making wannabes discussing different ideas for a movie. How meta. It just never goes anywhere and is often just insultingly stupid. Very poor choice to make this the first segment of the film, because it can only drive people away. The second bit, where a kid has a stuffed bear and clown invisible friends, was wholly predictable. By now this is a horribly cliched plot that you've seen a hundred times. But it's at least a decent rendition. We then get a film that is slightly unnerving but without gravitas. Next is one that is trying oh so terribly hard to be a parody of a stupid film that you can't tell if it was sort of OK (I mean, the mental patient who thought he was a dalek was entertaining, I guess) or just freaking awful. There's a forgettable foreign language part, and maybe also something I forgot, I don't even know. Then it ends upbeat with the behind the scenes at a Japanese movie monster film. The wraparound story is a complete non-entity, which is for some reason filmed from across the room 95% of the time so the horror host is almost shouting from the background. It's OK though, as the segments were completely meaningless to the overall film. Do yourself a favor and don't watch without fast forwarding through the bad parts.
