3/10
Very forgettable, but at least it's in bite-sized portions
12 September 2024
It was not easy to find out anything about this film online. It was advertised on Tubi as "Grave of the Living Dead" and described as a seven story anthology in a little over an hour. At that time (maybe it's gotten better since then) an online search turned up no pages talking about it, just Tubi. Weird. Whenever that happens I search by a combination of the actors names. That was problematic in this case because it had so many and was sorted alphabetically instead of by importance. I finally hit the right combination and got this page on IMDB for "Tales from the Grave: The Movie." So I tried to search for that instead, and that also got nowhere. It insisted upon finding all sorts of other titles with the same words. (Must be that new AI-powered search enhancement or something.) I like anthologies, and, doing the math, that meant I wouldn't be wasting too much time each story. So I went for it. The first story is "What We Leave Behind," where a daughter goes to help clear out a house after her parents died. Spookiness ensues. Not very good, though, story-wise or cinematography. They seemed to think it would be effective to apply a filter that restrains the colors. It's just annoying. Next up is "Crawling Chaos," which the credits list as based upon the H. P. Lovecraft story. Other than the obvious appropriation of the title and a very loose association (visions and drugs), they have nothing in common. This is a short story with a guy who runs out of his psychoactive medication and at first thinks he is fine and then later fears he is hallucinating. Not the worst, but perhaps the smallest bite. In "Demonic Attachment," a woman has a mysterious ailment nobody can find a cause for, so she goes to a mental health counselor. Or one comes to her, anyway. They note how unusual that is, but how many locations do you expect for a short film, anyway? She realizes something is wrong and brings in a collection of women occult studies/magic practitioners to deal with it. This has some problems, probably all due to funding, but I think it had the best premise and most interesting characters. I could almost see a TV series based upon it. Then we have "Stiffed," which is just another torture film based upon justified revenge. Think "I Spit on Your Grave" but over a far lesser offense. Still vaguely satisfying. Though the picture quality is again utter crap. After that is "Invocation," a horribly generic title with an annoying blue and red filter that was about a woman repeatedly performing a monotonous incantation. It about put me to sleep. Or maybe it did, temmporarily. It then moves into "Deadly Doll," which has the most godawful yellow and brown filter. I guess there's a little bit of puke green too. A woman receives a mysterious doll in the mail. It's the typical doll that moves around, and by moves around it's not physically walking because that would have required too much skill out of the filmmakers. It's just not where it was before. Ooh, scary! Later you see it stiffly dangling through a doorway obviously being held out by someone. Then something predictable happens (no spoilers). And I couldn't hold out anymore and just fell asleep. Since there was only 12 minutes left, I came back later and watched the rest. It was "Salt and Iron" with -- what is with this film? -- poor quality picture again. A stupid and/or drunk man goes fishing and stumbles upon a fertility ritual. Twelve scantily clad woman show up, one gets naked, predictable outcome. The end. It was not the worst collection of stories. Some are very bad, but some have glimmers of hope. Weighing them against each other, it only crawls up to a 3 out of 10. And let's hope they find a title for their next movie that is more easy to search for online.
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