I like to give horror anthologies a fair chance. Even the worst can have a small redeeming feature, such as one director being clearly better than the others (if not necessarily actually goof) or one story might be a bit more interesting (again, if not necessarily actually good.) And the prospect of seeing Lloyd Kaufman in what I assumed would be a brief cameo) kind of made me interested in watching.
I have no idea if Kaufman's role was just a cameo, or if there was some cheesy in-joke about it to enjoy because after watching the framing narrative, the first short, and about two minutes of the second one, I couldn't go on and uttered a sentence that has probably never been uttered before : This is too low-rent for even Lloyd Kaufman.
When the acting is so terrible that you legitimately assume these people had never acted before, that's bad. When the direction and cinematography are far worse than the acting, that's...just awful. Let me be clear -- this isn't classic Troma-level bad. It's easily the worst thing I've ever seen outside of the worst home movies. Trying to claim it's just a horror-comedy (it's not even remotely funny) misses the point -- the filming and acting are beyond home-movie terrible, and the one story I watched was about the level of fourth grade writing. And any hopes that a different director would offer something worth watching was dashed when the framing, the first short, and two minutes of the second short all appear to have the same director and cameraperson. There was no way to tell them apart in this sense, and I suspect that the extra names were just the names of friends of the one director and cameraperson (and I suspect the director did all his own camerawork too) thrown in there to make it sound like a legitimate anthology.
Seriously, people, don't watch it. The words "labor of love" seem far less apt than "labor of rage and loathing" here.
I have no idea if Kaufman's role was just a cameo, or if there was some cheesy in-joke about it to enjoy because after watching the framing narrative, the first short, and about two minutes of the second one, I couldn't go on and uttered a sentence that has probably never been uttered before : This is too low-rent for even Lloyd Kaufman.
When the acting is so terrible that you legitimately assume these people had never acted before, that's bad. When the direction and cinematography are far worse than the acting, that's...just awful. Let me be clear -- this isn't classic Troma-level bad. It's easily the worst thing I've ever seen outside of the worst home movies. Trying to claim it's just a horror-comedy (it's not even remotely funny) misses the point -- the filming and acting are beyond home-movie terrible, and the one story I watched was about the level of fourth grade writing. And any hopes that a different director would offer something worth watching was dashed when the framing, the first short, and two minutes of the second short all appear to have the same director and cameraperson. There was no way to tell them apart in this sense, and I suspect that the extra names were just the names of friends of the one director and cameraperson (and I suspect the director did all his own camerawork too) thrown in there to make it sound like a legitimate anthology.
Seriously, people, don't watch it. The words "labor of love" seem far less apt than "labor of rage and loathing" here.
