BEFORE: Steve Buscemi carries over again from "Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania". I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Buscemi earlier this year, though we weren't formally introduced, he came twice to the theater where I work part-time, once to attend a showing of the season premiere of "Russian Doll", and the second time he rented the theater to screen a film he directed for his friends, to get some feedback about it. I can't say much more, because it looks like that film was released in Canada but not in the U.S. just yet. But it was the sort of film that perhaps a lot of people made during the pandemic, where all the action takes place in one room of a person's house, and the plot dictates that other people call that person on the phone. Yeah, it's been a tough two years for filmmakers - it's a bit odd that I've seen films that were very obviously MADE during the lockdown, but very few films ABOUT the lockdown itself. I guess that means were so over it, or we heard so much about it every day for two years that no director wanted to make a movie about it, because the audience was burned out on that topic. Also, films are meant to be entertaining, and the lockdown was anything but that.
THE PLOT: A young boy tells three stories of horror to distract a witch who plans to eat him.
AFTER: This is NOT the first film Steve Buscemi was ever in - BUT, I think it is the feature film debut of Julianne Moore. And just in case you were wondering if those two people ever were in the same film as Debbie Harry and David Johansen, well, yes they were. Welcome to the 1990's, when anything and everything could happen, especially in a film based on a horror anthology TV series that never took itself too seriously in the first place. Remember "Twilight Zone: The Movie"? This is sort of like that, only cheaper - and the TV show was like the syndicated knock-off version of "Tales from the Crypt".
The TV show ran from 1983 to 1988, and nearly everyone who was anyone on TV made some kind of an appearance, from Jerry Stiller, Harry Anderson, Phyllis Diller and Dick Shawn down to Chuck McCann, Abe Vigoda, Paul Dooley and Lorna Luft. This sounds a bit like John Waters' dream cast for his magnum opus. Robert Forster, Jerry Orbach, Divine, Tippi Hedren, and people who are now bigger stars, like Seth Green and Victor Garber. Seymour Cassel and Tom frickin' Noonan! Bradley Whitford and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar! Eric Bogosian, Colm Meaney and Yeardley Smith! Not all on the same episode, of course. But I watched a bunch of these episodes back then, late at night on the forgotten UHF channels, after everyone else had gone to bed, and I didn't even like horror movies back then! But I had seen every episode of the classic "Twilight Zone" show and this seemed like the next logical step.
So "TFTD" got five seasons and a movie, that's not bad. And there are three stories here (though the poster says four, that's counting the wrap-around) so if you don't like one, well, maybe the next one is more your style. Hope springs eternal. The amazing thing here is that I avoided this film for, what, 32 years? It just somehow never came up, but then I've got "Creepshow", another anthology on my watch list, and that seems to be taking even longer to link to. I've only got room this Shocktober for one anthology horror semi-comedy film, though.
In the opening, there's a modern-day witch who invited her paperboy to stay for dinner, but she neglected to tell him that he's on the menu. She's been fattening him up with chocolate chip cookies (umm, how long has she kept him locked up?) and his only hope is to use the stories from this big book that she gave him to read to distract her, until it's too late to cook him for the dinner party. She claims to have read the book before, but she also acts like she's never heard them before, so there's some inconsistency there. Well, I guess it is a rather large book, but this is still a clear rip-off of both "Hansel & Gretel" and "1,001 Arabian Nights".
The first story is about a couple of Ivy-League graduate students, one of whom (Lee) just beat the other (Edward) for a notable scholarship, he got his girlfriend (Susan) to write a killer essay for him and also frame him for stealing some artifact. (Dude, you couldn't frame him yourself, you had to get your girlfriend to do that? And you call yourself a MAN?). To get revenge Edward somehow gets a real Egyptian mummy delivered (this was 1990, before eBay even existed, so HOW?) and finds the scroll within its body that contains the spell for re-animation. The mummy kills Edward and then Lee, in ways that are symbolic to the mummification process - this is a mummy with issues, it seems. Then Susan's brother gets HIS revenge by chopping the mummy into pieces and burning the re-animation scroll. I don't know, that doesn't really seem like an equal revenge - "You killed my sister and best friend, so I'm going to burn this piece of parchment!" It's a bit uneven, I'm just saying. This is allegedly based on a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, perhaps it made more sense in the original Victorian setting.
The second story is "Cat From Hell", in which an old man hires a hit-man to kill a cat, because he believes that the cat is responsible for the deaths of his sister, her best friend, and the family's butler. The old man ran a pharmaceutical company that tested drugs on cats, and believes that the cat is getting revenge for the deaths of thousands of other cats. Or, you know, maybe the cat was just being a cat, and those people died accidentally. But since this story was written by Stephen King, probably not. Anyway, the hit-man doesn't find it so easy to kill the cat, he tries choking it and shooting it, and nothing works, he's worse than Wile E. Coyote trying to kill the Road Runner. But he never tried starving the cat and feeding it poison, just a thought.
And the last story is about an unsuccessful artist who witnesses the killing of his friend by a giant gargoyle monster. The monster spares his life, provided that he never tells anyone what he saw, or that he knows that gargoyles can come to life. That same night, he meets a beautiful woman and falls in love, and she also has connections in the art world, but eventually he feels compelled to tell her what happened to his friend the night that they met. Yeah, that doesn't end well.
Hmm, a lot of mummies around here lately, werewolves and mummies have been dominant in this year's horror chain so far. What's really weird is that there were three mummy characters tonight on "The Masked Singer", and one of the (incorrect) guesses was the three Lawrence brothers - Joey, Matthew and, umm, the other one. And Matthew Lawrence is also in tonight's film, which has a mummy in it! That's just a bit too weird, almost spooky - but I know by now there are no coincidences, just happy accidents.
Also starring Debbie Harry (last seen in "New Wave: Dare to Be Different"), Matthew Lawrence (last seen in "Mrs. Doubtfire"), Christian Slater (last seen in "The Wife"), Robert Sedgwick (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Donald Van Horn, Michael Deak, Julianne Moore (last seen in "An Ideal Husband"), George Guidall (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Kathleen Chalfant (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), Ralph Marrero, William Hickey (last seen in "Prizzi's Honor"), David Johansen (last seen in "Freejack"), Paul Greeno, Alice Drummond (last seen in "The Love Letter"), Dolores Sutton, Mark Margolis (last seen in "House of D"), James Remar (last seen in "Setup"), Rae Dawn Chong (last seen in "The Color Purple"), Robert Klein (last seen in George Carlin's American Dream"), Ashton Wise, Philip Lenkowsky (last seen in "Resistance"), Joe Dabenigno, Larry Silvestri (last seen in "The Warriors"), Donna Davidge, Nicolle Rochelle, Daniel Harrison, David Forrester, with a cameo from Vincent Pastore (last seen in "Walking and Talking")
RATING: 4 out of 10 art gallery patrons
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