Trapped Ashes

The actress Phoebe Kane (Rachel Veltri) and her boyfriend Andy (Jayce Bartok), the architect Henry (Scott Lowell) and his wife Julia (Lara Harris), the former director Leo (John Saxon) and Nathalie (Michèle- Barbara Pelletier) receive an invitation for a VIP Tour in the Ultra Studios. When they see the spooky house where the missing director Desmond Hacker filmed "Hysteria", they ask their tour guide (Henry Gibson) to stop the car to visit the infamous house. In a moment, they find that they are trapped in a room without any exit and the guide suggests them to tell the scariest experience of each one like in "Hysteria". Each one tells a spooky tale until they finally discover the end of their stories.

"Trapped Ashes" follows the structure of "Creepshow" with a lead story and four segments in the format of "Tales from the Crypt". The lead segment is directed by Joe Dante and the motive why the participants disclose their stories is silly and unreasonable. Ken Russell directs the funny and bizarre "The Girl with the Golden Breasts" with the artificial breasts implanted by the actress sucking human blood. Sean S. Cunningham directs "Jibaku" with the journey to hell of Julia in Japan. Monte Hellman directs the erotic "Stanley's Girlfriend" and with sexy Nina performed by the gorgeous unknown Amelia Cooke affecting the relationship of two best friends. John Gaeta directs the gruesome segment "My Twin, The Worm". In the end, "Trapped Ashes" is a good entertainment despite the unfair reviews in IMDb. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Armadilha do Terror" ("Trap of Terror")

Note: On 17 January 2012, I saw this film again.

On 21 August 2015, I saw this film again.

Remember all those British-produced anthology horror films that sometimes made it to US theaters back in the 70s, but were more often screened on Saturday late night or Sunday afternoon television? Stuff like THE VAULT OF HORROR or TORTURE GARDEN or FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (or TALES FROM THE CRYPT or TALES THAT WITNESS MADNESS and on and on)? TRAPPED ASHES is a heartfelt and enthusiastic (and largely successful) attempt to revisit that kind of sometimes-serious, sometimes-funny, sometimes-trashy scare flick.

Encompassing four short episodes and a wrap-around set in a deserted Hollywood studio tour's "haunted house," TRAPPED ASHES explores vampiric breast implants, horny spirits of suicidal Japanese monks, tapeworm twins, and the soul-sucking girlfriend of Stanley Kubrick. Some of the episodes are more successful than others, with the most confident probably being the "Stanley's Girlfriend" one, directed by the most decidedly NON-genre vet Monte Hellman. It's a really touching, elegiac little piece, full of imagination and a genuine love for the world of film. The other three stories - and the wraparound - are more traditionally horrific, but also very inspired in their mixture of sex, horror and a warped approach to the genre. The Ken Russell segment in particular, "The Girl with the Golden Breasts," had the audience in Toronto alternately laughing with glee or squirming in discomfort, leading to three audience casualties!

TRAPPED ASHES will appeal most to horror fans who are looking for a sometimes familiar, but definitely unique and twisted type of anthology genre film. Full of breasts, blood, great special effects, appearances by older actors like Henry Gibson, John Saxon, and a cool, "blink and you'll miss him!" cameo by none other than Dick Miller, it's a wonderful horror-movie debut for screenwriter Dennis Bartok and a great turn by all the veteran directors (and new director/vet f/x guy John Gaeta).

Highly recommended for a fun and old-fashioned-style scary time at the movies.

Anthology films rarely work for me. Most of them are as uneven as twenty miles of bad road. TRAPPED ASHES was yet another bumpy ride.

Six people are trapped in a room and must relate terrible things that they've had happen to them to their host (Henry Gibson). What follows are four segments directed by auteurs not necessarily known for their horror chops (with the possible exception of Sean S. Cunningham). Each segment prominently features the ties between sex and death so prevalent in horror films. One features a woman with vampiric breasts whose lamprey mouthed nipples sucks the blood of her lovers. Another woman falls for a corpse who whisks her away to hell while on Japanese holiday. A succubus falls for Stanley Kubrick. And the last, poor woman shares the insatiable hunger of her fraternal twin, a tapeworm.

The first segment sets up expectations that TRAPPED ASHES will be a much more lighthearted film. Surprisingly, this segment was directed by Ken Russell though it felt like something from Joe Dante or Paul Bartel (it was especially reminiscent of Irvin Kershner's "Hell Toupee" episode of "Amazing Stories"). The Sean S. Cunningham sequence felt like a pail gaijin aping of Hideo Nakata (THE RING) and John Gaeta's just didn't work at all. I enjoyed the Kubrick bit, courtesy of Monte Hellman - a perennial Cashiers du Cinemart fave - except that the horror element seemed like an afterthought.

Surprised that this wasn't called TALES FROM THE CRYPT: TRAPPED ASHES, this is one that can be missed by all except die hard John Saxon fans.

I don't know why but I used to be a huge fan of Creepshow and Tales from the crypt although the later series were rather lame. "Trapped Ashes" is very much in this tradition and features 4 horror shorts bound together in a surrounding plot of 2 couples and 2 solo people going on a sightseeing on a Hollywood movie site and getting stuck in an hold horror house with an old guy who leads them around. Turns out they can only leave if each tells their most frightening personal story... so here we go... Story 1 is about an actress who doesn't get any new jobs and decides to get a boob job. Now after her life turns around for the positive she soon realizes that her breast are vampire boobies feeding on human blood which doesn't go to well for her lovers. This story is pretty bizarre and trashy and captures the spirit of old "Tales from the crypt" stories best. Its totally idiotic but the end is so over the top its fun. Story 2 is a ghost-story about a couple moving to Japan where the woman is seduced by a monk who dies and takes her to hell where she turns into a succubus. Her husband soon learns he has to free her from there by feeding her a spell. The story is OK, but as frightening or thrilling as a Sesamestreet Episode. At least you get some naked shots and some nice animation sequences of old Japanese paintings which work pretty well. Story 3 is pretty much nothing leading nowhere. An actor and his best friend a scriptwriter regularly meet for chess until a girl appears. Soon the scriptwriter disappears and the actor begins a love affair to find out years later that the girl is some kind of ghost/witch/vampire... honestly I couldn't care less because the episode is boring and makes no sense. Story 4 is another strange one about a girl who grows up in her mothers womb along with a tapeworm and lives with a strange desire for collecting food for her "twin". When she is treated badly by her stepmother the "twin" takes revenge.

What most of the stories suffer from is incredibly long passages of introducing of characters and that is way stretched and often even unnecessary for the plod. So when the action starts most of the time is up and there is not too much time for the horror to happen. Like most of those story collections there is some bad apples in there and I couldn't recommend this average movie just for the vampire boobies and the finale. This is just for real die hard fans of horror shorts... the slow ghost movies won't be too interesting for neither "Tales..." Fans nor others because they don't lead nowhere. Too bad...

Maybe it's too much of an assumption, or a generalization, but horror fans love anthologies! "Waxworks" (1924) and "Dead of Night" (1945) were the pioneers, and during the 70s in Britain, the Amicus Studios even specialized in them with a couple of classics as results, like "The House that Dripped Blood" and "Asylum". The ultimately popular omnibus came in the 80s, with George A. Romero's "Creepshow". Starting from the 90s, it became somewhat of a gimmick to have the separate segments directed by different - and preferably prestigious - directors. The variety of names usually makes it even more attractive for fans, but the participation of famous directors doesn't necessarily guarantee a brilliant anthology.

The names of the directors involved in "Trapped Ashes" is impressive, to say the least. Joe Dante ("The Howling", "Piranha") signed for the wraparound story, which gathers a group of seven people on a guided tour in an abandoned Hollywood movie studio. Dante, always his jolly self, takes the opportunity to give small roles to his buddies (like Dick Miller and Henry Gibson) but he's not given much material to work with otherwise.

The actual segments vary from extremely disappointing to surprisingly shocking. Sean S. Cunningham, horror-immortal thanks to the original "Friday the 13th", delivers the weakest contribution with a confusing and quite pretentious tale set in mystical Japan. The best story - or, better said, my own personal favorite - is a tie between Ken Russell's "The Girl with the Golden Breast" and John Gaeta's "My Twin, the Worm". The first is tacky but pleasantly deranged variation on the "I'll do whatever it takes to make it in Hollywood" theme, and I particularly love the second because of its rather disturbed premise of a fetus and a parasite developing in the womb together. Monte Hellman's tale is mediocre at best, in spite of the presence of the almighty John Saxon and the ingenious references towards Stanley Kubrick.

Undeniably, the main theme in every short story is sex. In fact, almost the entire film qualifies as pure body-horror, which also means that the sex and nudity is never arousing or even pleasant to look at. All the individual segments may look unfinished, since they all end rather abruptly, but even the lesser experienced horror fanatics can guess the real denouement comes at the end of the wraparound story. "Trapped Ashes" is a decent effort and an atypical anthology. I'm glad that I saw it, but I can't label it as a classic, nor a favorite.