TalesoftheDead

Tales of the Dead (2008)

In Tales of the Dead a group of English friends gathers together on Halloween night to smoke a hookah, drink some beers and watch some scary flicks. It takes quite a while for things to get rolling in the beginning. Eventually they put in the first short film they are watching and we switch to it. It’s about some crazy lady who is obsessed with amputations and wants to have her own leg and arm cut off to feel “whole”. It’s pretty pointless but a bit eerie and did succeed at making me feel slightly nauseated. Thankfully the movie was cut short and I didn’t have to sit through much of it before it go back to the group of friends as they chatted about what they’d just seen and picked out another of the DVD’s they brought to watch. The next flick they watch is about a kid who is an aspiring filmmaker with a vivid imagination. As he goes through his normal life it shows the things he imagines, which end up being more hallucinations than anything. The kid is being raised by his single mother and keeps having flashbacks to his father’s death. At the end of the film he is randomly attacked by a zombie hoard that he apparently didn’t just imagine. When it goes back to the group that is watching the movies, they at least seemed to have enjoyed it. The next film they watched looked like it might have a point. It was about a cop who was into bondage going after a serial killer who was into bondage. It seemed like it was going somewhere, but then ended abruptly. Finally the group gets to their last film. This one started off looking like a collection of home video’s shot of some people who bore a striking resemblance to the people watching the videos (played by the same actors, but not really acknowledged as such). Eventually it morphs into a Ghost hunters type documentary when the group in the film goes to some street that was cursed by witches that were killed there. It goes on for some time as they investigate the “curse”. They eventually go back to the cursed street to find one of their friends who called them from there. Once they arrive different people in the group just start disappearing and the movie ends. When it goes back to the group watching the movies they get to the last person who was supposed to bring a film, but instead she decides to tell them a scary story. It’s about a murderer in their neighborhood killing people who decorate for Halloween after turning off their power to their house. As she’s telling it the camera keeps flashing to a rubber gloved monster hand moving around somewhere. She doesn’t get too far before the lights go out and that’s the end of the movie.

Some of the acting wasn’t that bad in this movie. At least the people in it weren’t too over the top of got tongue tied a lot. The writing was pretty horrible though and most of the stories didn’t really have endings. Even though the individual films in the collection were short, the movie as a whole seemed to go on and on with no point at all. The special effects were few and not all that great, the best ones being the severed limbs in the amputee story. They had very dramatic music that they played at inappropriate times, which was kind of funny even though I don’t think they meant it to be. It wasn’t shot that badly and they did seem to try to experiment with different styles as they shot the different films shown in the movie. I just don’t think that they quite got what they were trying for though.

This movie was pretty pointless in my opinion. It might have been better if more of the stories in it actually had endings instead of just abruptly stopping. I was slightly disturbed by the amputee story but other than that was just bored. By the end of the movie I was just hoping for it to be over as soon as possible and then it was. Still not the worst movie I’ve seen though and some of the stories showed a certain amount of potential, just no follow through.

1 out of 4

reviewed by Scott Schwarzwalder