We have another horror anthology (or "portmanteau" as someone has recently reminded me) this time. It of course is my favorite sub-genre of horror flick so I always go in to these with high expectations. As is the norm, we have several horror shorts that range from somewhere in the neighborhood of a half hour to a few minutes. With many different writers and directors it's sure to be a little asymmetrical from story to story. The confusion in the year of origin comes from the fact that filming began in 1986 but not finished until 1989. But when was it released? Yup, you guessed it, 2004. Don't look at me that way, go look it up.
All of the shorts have a connecting wrap around story that involves a couple of ghouls (or are they demons? perhaps just your run of the mill monsters) try to rent a video on Halloween. By the time they get to the video store it is closing and they really want to watch CreepTales. They then decide to go dig up their Uncle Munger who was buried with a copy of the film. They take it home and have a bunch of other monsters/ demons/ghouls over to watch it with them. Only problem is Uncle Munger wants his copy back! I won't talk about all of the stories but I will highlight a few of them. The first one I will talk about is "Snatcher" which stars SpongeBob voice actor Tom Kenny as a purse snatcher who is having a great day. That is until he snatches the wrong purse. It's not a long story, maybe ten minutes and it's mostly a montage of purses being snatched. It's a good time and it has a really fun ending.
Next we'll move on to Groovy Ghoulie Garage. This one concerns two friends who on Halloween night have to go pick up the sister of one of them who has recently been kicked out of school. On the way there their car breaks down so they wait for a tow truck to take their car in for repairs and where do they go? Groovy Ghoulie Garage is where. From here on in things just don't seem right about the town or the Halloween Party they go to in town while they wait for their car to be fixed. While I've seen this story done before (and better I'll admit) which makes it predictable it has some sort of charm to it.
The last story I want to mention is the final short. "Sucker" concerns a woman who lives in a filthy and cluttered house. A traveling salesman offers her the answer to her problems. The dust buster (or Dirt Demon I think he calls it) will clean up anything she points it at. It only comes with two rules: use it for no more than thirty seconds at a time and do not point it at any person. But what if pointing it at her husband will solve her biggest problem? She has 24 hours to us it as the salesman will be back for it tomorrow.
While it's stories
vary in quality, a couple are real stinkers that I didn't even mention
but none of them are very long. I enjoyed this one and even though I
usually give anthologies portmanteaus a higher grade
than they deserve I will still give this one three and a half houses of
skulls out of five. Hey, in it's defense it does have Forrest J.
Ackerman acting as creative consultant! That has to count for
something.
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