Bangkok Haunted (2001)

Director: Oxide Pang and Pisut Praesangeam

Screenplay: Pisut Praesangeam and Sompop Wetchapipat

Cast: Pimsiree Pimsee as Paga / Jieb, Dawan Singha-Wee as Pan, Kalyanut Sriboonrueng as Kanya, Pete Thongchua as Nop

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A horror anthology from Thailand, Bangkok Haunted however does something very different in not having the wraparound start the feature, but immediately lunging into the first of three stories, so let us begin as such too. An ancient drum, for the first story, is being transferred in a truck. It is established to have a ghost woman haunting the instrument as the man watching the items in the back is more concerned of leaping out at speed onto the road to get away. The young woman that receives this drum, Jieb (Pimsiree Pimsee), is going to have to deal with the haunted consequences.

We see the drum's origins in 1917, as it is connected to an adopted girl whose parents died of sickness and whose adoptive father is a scholar of music. Raised to become a dancer, Paga (also played Pimsee) befriends another child, a disfigured and ostracised one, who when they become adults is infatuated with her despite Paga only views him as a brother whilst loving another man. This is the most conventional of the three stories in plotting, yet allowed enough space to breathe as Jieb in the modern day with an older male scholar, wandering into flashbacks in the past within her dreams without warning, realise something is amiss with the drum and research its past. It seems like a critique, for a forty four minute segment, that I will not write a lot about this segment beyond this, but it starts with a sound opening for the entire project by co-director Oxide Pang. Oxide Pang with his twin brother Danny came into prominence by the 2000s for films that caught the "Tartan Asian Extreme" wave of interest in the West for Asian genre cinema. Born in Hong Kong, they have juggled genres, action with Bangkok Dangerous (1999) and its 2008 remake with Nicolas Cage, alongside the original 2002 version of The Eye, a horror film about a woman who sees ghosts as a blind woman who was given her sight back through a donor's set of eyes. Their work outside the director's chair deserves credit too as Danny Pang was the editor on the Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002-3), the first one of the many films from the East which caught on fire with interest for Western film fans. They have worked together as brothers but also separately, Oxide Pang making this film instead with Pisut Praesangeam, a Thai filmmaker/producer/screenwriter in the latter's home country, setting this anthology within Bangkok.

The first segment is the pair's most traditional anthology story in tone, one which does provide an appropriately macabre twist - [Spoiler Warning] one of Paga's arms was inside the drum and we learn how it got there [Spoilers End] - and feels the perfect length for its micro-feature tone by itself. After this, Bangkok Haunted's stories are more idiosyncratic in their structures. Probably the biggest virtue, for a film for whatever inexplicable reason I hated when I first saw it, likely due to its slow burn pace, is that all three segments are distinct. Even if the next two as tales entirely set in the modern urban landscape of Bangkok, those two managed to stand out from each other in tone, and since the entire feature is over two hours long and lets them all feel like micro-features, there is no sense of rushing plot points or losing their individual moods either. The wraparound, whilst with a spooky gotcha in the final shot, is not really a story but I still liked it, especially as it feels more like a nice wrapping that does not need to have a dynamic build. It is a curveball when that, only after a forty four minute tale, we have it established three female friends are telling scary stories in a cafe, with them critiquing plot logic or trying to figure out cool titles for each other's stories. It is actually a cool twist on the horror anthology tone to not have a twist, just a trio of interesting story tellers who are friends and engaging with each other.

Story two could be said to be too convoluted and weird for its own good, but it is weird for me as much in a good way. The mature tale of the three, with its explicit nudity and grotesqueness, it is about an essence called Phy Essence. The segment is almost out of order in explaining the plot details, which is why it could be extremely confusing, but as for our female lead, the Phy Essence is a love potion which you can buy hush hush, here in a funny moment in a sex shop where a male customer complains the porn tape he has rented is too damaged at the best parts. The essence is seen once slipped into a man's drink, but is a McGuffin, not really explained but designed to make men fall inescapably in love with the woman who uses it.

The essence, as established in the first scene in a hospital morgue with necrophilia overtones, is collected by one guy who finds recently dead and beautiful female corpses, and is made from the blood collected from their slit open necks. It is a task he secretly gets on with even if he is in danger of being caught, or finds a male colleague getting drunk on the shift and sleeping under a blanket on one of the gurneys among the corpses. That we see the corpses occasionally open their eyes or move their hands suggests that the Phy Essence has ill advised magical aspects too, more so as there is a ghost woman looming about, and that with one of the male suitors, you see the harmful effects of the essence. Not only does he effectively sleep with both a living and dead woman at the same time on a one night stand, but ends up first puking up for the initial symptoms, only to be at death's door with a Buddhist priest trying to help him. Another will be killed by a car and immediately come back as a ghost due to the essence, and it is clear the magic behind it has dangerous properties alongside the gristly nature of the concoction just making the dead angry and come back to haunt those involved in using it.

It is a very idiosyncratic story, probably more vague then it itself realises, very erotic and sexually explicit in a way that it is quite striking with time passing, be it the humour of the lead living next door to a couple in an apartment who are too loud in their passions, or the necrophilia aspects at the morgue. We had some transgressive films from this early 2000s wave that dealt with sexuality - like Takeshi Miike from Japan and the late Kim Ki-duk from South Korea, the later sadly someone we have to put a caveat around due to sexual misconduct allegations - but sexuality was not really as prominent in this era of violence, of action and genre films which did not really tackle those subjects, or the trend for ghost stories influenced from Asian filmmakers modernising them, only to get remade as American films that same decade. You can make the argument this is erotic for the sake of titillation, not for profoundness, but at the same time, you also have a story where despite this women are central to the plot, which is striking within itself. It is effectively a moral tale of women stuck in the position of needing the Phy Essence, because they feel they need to go out into night clubs for men to date, with the essence whose gift is too dangerous. It is a tale when even men who die from its effect become ghosts too, leading to a haunting here where those made to love a woman will do so even if, in one of the best shots of the whole film, they live together in physical embrace after her death in the same grave. With its very electronic, New Age tinged music, it has for all its all-over-the-place plotting a distinct tone that I appreciated, effectively a cousin to a segment for the Three Extremes (2004) anthology, which was expanded into a 2004 feature film by itself, a work directed by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan called Dumplings. Three... Extremes leant into the growing interest in Asian cinema at the time with three directors from three different countries - Fruit Chan from Hong Kong and known for films like Made in Hong Kong (1997), Takashi Miike from Japan, and one of the biggest figures to gain prominent and his career grown from this trend, Park-Chan Wook from South Korea. Dumplings itself in either its versions was explicitly about the theme I feel the Phy Essence is about, the idea of women forced to follow gendered conventions, in that case to stay youthful in a world when men's eyes wander to younger women, through the very twisted concept of Chinese dumplings made with human foetuses. Whilst Bangkok Haunted's own tale of ill advised love charms is stranger, they make a fascinating pair on the cursed love remedies from the perspectives of women if you have a strong stomach for one of the pair mentioned.

Story three begins with a scene of a crime, where a woman has hung herself in a warehouse. The police office on the case suspects it was not a suicide but a murder, believing there was no way for her to get up to where she was found alongside evidence of a struggle beforehand. Whilst the police chief refuses to press on with this idea, he investigates on his own terms, and the coroner cements his concerns when there are suspicious clues complicating her death. This is interesting as a crime mystery steeped in the supernatural; when a scene transpires when a random couple following him swear they saw a woman trying to get out of the moving vehicle, it is clear he is now haunted by her too. All three stories involve ghostly women wronged, and that really becomes apparent for this tale of a horrible series of circumstances for its one innocent, the woman herself.

Whilst in dire need of a high definition re-release, it is by this segment I came to appreciate Bangkok Haunted's general washed out and dingy aesthetic with moments of subtle colour. Even though one of the tales is partially set in 1917, with significantly more colour in the forest locations, this film really emphasises the idea of the back alleys and dark night streets of Bangkok throughout itself. With there being a second scene in this segment within a sex shop, as the lead makes enquiries on the woman leading to her husband, it is very atmospheric in imagining these ghosts drifting among the living in these cramped environments, the places not seen as idyllic and grungy but the real world for normal people stuck in crammed apartments trying to find ways to get on in life. They are not disconnected from the living either, which makes this aesthetic more appropriate, as it leads to suspicion of domestic abuse from her husband, seemingly changed and wheelchair bound from a car crash. The key to the segment from here is a series of red herrings, including a male lover of hers who is a boss at a construction site, where the many men in her life are not good people. This includes the lead himself who is revealed to have been part of it too. There is a sick humour as more people are revealed to be innocent when information is learnt when it is too late, including unfortunate deaths of suspects, and one of the best turns when someone's innocence is proven but through his involvement for another crime of political corruption. One twist comes fully from a murder mystery pot boiler - [Huge Spoiler] with the help of ice to be able to reach a hanging spot [Spoilers End] - and ultimately not even our white knight lead is a good man, just finding excuses to purge his own guilt from the things he did to the woman.

The story has many trigger warnings as already brought up and also revealed, including a deliberate miscarriage with a coat hanger that is not comfortable to witness without being tasteless. They lead to this being the saddest tale of the three about a woman who did not deserve her lot, whose affairs were clearly to escape her misery, and whose fate leaves her a ghost watching those involved discover their own complicity and fall off the rails. It is a perfect conclusion to a trio of stories I unfairly dismissed in my youth, and I have absolute respect for the entire project, with three strong entries, being a very good horror anthology which took risks, be it telling a traditional ghost story, being very weird and sexual, and for this one to actually force one to sympathise for its female lead in its uncomfortable nods to how bad human beings can be to each other.

Darna Mana Hai (2003)

 

Director: Prawaal Raman

Screenplay: Atul Sabharwal, Rajnish Thakur and Abbas Tyrewala

Cast: Nana Patekar as John Rodriguez, Saif Ali Khan as Anil Manchandani, Vivek Oberoi as Amar Vashisht, Sanjay Kapoor as Sanjay Joshi, Sohail Khan as Karan Ahuja, Shilpa Shetty as Gayatri Pandit, Isha Koppikar as Abhilasha Malhotra, Aftab Shivdasani as Purav Khandelwal, Boman Irani as the hotel owner, Sameera Reddy as Shruti Kapoor, Gaurav Kapoor as Romi Yadav, Antara Mali as Anjali Deshmukh, Raghuvir Yadav as Dayashankar Pandey, Anuj Pandit Sharma as Varun Goswami, Rajpal Yadav as the apple vendor, Sushant Singh as the serial killer, Malavika as Neha Bhatia, Rahul Singh as Dev Bohra, Peeya Rai Chowdhary as Mehnaz, Kiku Sharda as Amar Varma, Yusuf Hussain as Mr. Khandelwal

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A Bollywood horror anthology, there were songs made about the stories within this production and a soundtrack release for this film, but they were left out as bonus features included on the DVD I viewed this through. Whilst I will be very positive about this film in general, thankfully the opening credits by themselves compensated for this and are adore as this film’s own idiosyncratic creative choice for this genre. That being, after a shot of black gore seeping over a blood red apple, a Eurodrance influenced song kicks in. Female dancers in black body suits dance against a red background, with motifs of all the story segments included, whilst the male singer croons the morbid ditty which is the central song. This is not something you would have gotten in a Amicus anthology from the seventies, but here is was a great way to establish its personality, follow the tradition of the subgenre by opening with the wraparound story first that will weave between all the other tales.

A group of college students, alongside one named Vikas with his apple cutting knife looking like he is about to snap at any minute, are driving in the middle of the night until a flat tire leaves them stuck in the jungle. Whilst there are some aged fat shaming at one of the men, who is not even that large physically, thankfully it sets them up stuck at an abandoned old house in the middle of the night whilst trying to find a phone. An improvised game of cricket or a sing-along of Hindi film songs are rejected for telling stories to each other, critiquing them in each cut back to the main cast as a secret figure is picking each one off as each story-within-a-story plays out. The first story is arguably the most conventional, and you need to think of it as more a starter before the main course, about a couple on their honeymoon driving at night. Their car also breaks, and the husband vanishes checking the engine to his wife’s horror. It is the shortest tale, with someone sinking into a bog and a doppelganger, with stab wound sound jump scares. Whilst an obvious one, it is a nice beginning tale to an anthology which gets insanely interesting immediately afterwards and never lost my interest from this point onwards.

The second story is of Anil, another taste of the perils of driving in the middle of nowhere, in this case reaching a hotel. This leads to a fascinating turn as it is about the least expected thing, Anil as a smoker who has ended up at a non-smoking hotel, one ran by a man who loves old Tom & Jerry cartoons and hates smoking, so much so he locks the entrance door and says at gun point he can cure Anil of his bad habit if he stays for six months. Here we have a bleak comedy about a man, forcing Amil to stay, with a seventy per cent success rate in his patients giving up, the other thirty per cent in the basement in plastic body bags. It is such a good, gleefully morbid tale to have, not what you would expect traditionally for a horror story.

The third story is just as good, about a male school teacher, a strict one who punishes the same young girl for forgetting her homework all the time. That is until she finally does, and then the guilt kicks in and spirals out of control. There is more to this, a guilt from pushing a school classmate to his death off a roof, who has seemingly possessed her, but even that plays to that sense of guilt over this poor girl in general. Using very stylish choices of editing and fast forward montage to ramp up this mood, this is a really interesting juggle of its central twist and this theme of the cruelness of a teacher. With “Aum” found on each page of her work, the sigh to him his school friend is involved from the grave, it is as much a psychological tale with a  sick sense of awkward humour as he is the one unraveling, even calling her mother to talk about doing her homework. Or even visiting the home at night to see of how she does the homework, disturbing the mother especially as his least conventional attempt at home intrusion is misinterpreted as nefarious threat on a small child. Even if supernatural as a tale, it is a well told tale with madness as the punishment which also works fully.

The fourth story is about a housewife and a sinister apple merchant, which is the strangest story of them all if the one with arguably the most macabre interpretation, as any who eats his apples, like her cricket loving husband, turns into an apple themselves. There is not a lot more to say than this, barring that this is fun and actually quite disturbing. It brings a new perspective on the Golden Delicious depending on what the merchant does with the new produce. The fifth story is more sobered, another man driving at night who picks up a hitchhiker in a churchyard. As Creedence Clearwater Revival’s version of Good Golly Miss Molly plays on the car radio, the hitchhiker says he has lost his wife ten days earlier, though he is the one who died. There are more twists to this nice little piece, turning between drama and humour, like the preferred term of “spirit” over “ghost” or one twist involving a hidden camera prank, making it a success.

The final main story is also a success, a guy doomed to be on the bottom of life at a college named Purab. That is until he finds a sacred statue in the hills he rants at for his lot in life, and gains the ability to stop time. Power immediately corrupts, and whilst there is a gross hint of what he could do, particularly with a woman he is attracted to at college when he briefly freezes her, but it is thankfully dealt with as wrong as it should be, with most of the story a naïve sense of true evil, thinking he can instead show her how he can stop the world without doing so to her to convince her to love him instead, whilst getting petty revenge on his domineering father and planning the crimes he could get up to. Gaining more and more megalomaniac tendencies, the punch line involves the danger of posing in front of mirrors that cements a strong series of segments. Arguably with the exception of the first, which still works as an introduction, it is one of the strongest anthologies I have seen in terms of consistency.

The wraparound itself is strong as well, as it effectively becomes a slasher film ending involving a killer who hates fear. It even ends on a melancholic note for everyone involved, even for the killer. The result is a very strong anthology altogether, with zero expectations going to this barring optimism. Even the pre-film DVD ads stood out as a fresh remainder, with hindsight, as a complete outsider to Bollywood cinema that I wish to actually dig up more films like this and for more of them to be readily available in terms of the later Blu-Ray era as much as streaming. By the time this film was first release we are already at the point this film’s distributor, Eros International, was celebrating twenty five years of distributing Bollywood films globally. They were still releasing VHS and V-CD releases, but also were also providing online and satellite broadcasting, even providing their own online DVD rental system on their website. It is a tangent, but considering all the very positive things I have said about Darna Mana Hai, and that it is the kind of horror anthology that a lot of people would really dig, the fact that this is a film you do not find on Blu Ray and not licensed from a distributor, when back in the day Eros International were doing their damndest to distribute an entire country’s cinema, speaks a bit from an outsider’s annoyance. That Bollywood is still something, whilst with its own huge audience, felt too separated even if as much my own ignorance is as much to blame too. That is not even taking into consideration this was the debut film for its director Prawaal Raman, which has to be praised for his first film being a really solid horror anthology alongside everyone else on the production.  

Theatre of Darkness: Yamishibai Season 1 (2013)

a.k.a. Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories

Director: Tomoya Takashima

Screenplay: Hiromu Kumamoto

Voice Cast: Kanji Tsuda as the Story teller

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

The review linked to below comes with knowledge that, starting in 2013 and with more series being produced up to 2024 itself, Yamishibai may still continue into 2025 onwards. Taking the tradition of kamishibai, a form of paper play storytelling and theatre, and amalgamating it in a "micro-series" with urban legends, ghost tales and moments of general spooky misanthropy, it won me over. tIn mind that future series will even tie into cult cinema, with Noboru Iguchi (The Machine Girl (2008)) and Takashi Shimizu (the Ju-On/the Grudge franchise) getting involved from the second series onwards, and I cannot wait to get to the future series.

 

For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

Beasts (1976)

 

Directors: Don Taylor, Richard Bramall, Don Leaver, Donald McWhinnie and John Nelson-Burton

Screenplay: Nigel Kneale

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Nigel Kneale is famous for the character of Bernard Quatermass, created for the sadly lost BBC TV production The Quatermass Experiment (1953), which only has the first episode still in existence. Thankfully, the two other TV productions have survived intact, as do the three Hammer adaptations of all three stories for cinema, and the 1979 Quatermass, a TV series closing off the character. Kneale worked on other projects too, and this one was originally for Associated Television (ATV), part of the Independent Television (ITV) network before ITV became the British channel it is in the current day. To avoid confusion, as I am too young to have grown up in this era when Beasts was first broadcast, ITV was for decades since its creation in 1955, the first commercial TV station in Britain, actually a network of separate television companies who shared programming as well as created television for different regions. Nowadays, barring Scotland and Northern Ireland having their own distinct regional differences, and programming like the news being focused on different regions, ITV has mostly conglomerated all its networks in itself and is divided by having additional numbered channels. Whilst ATV, who provided a service to the Midlands all week from 1968 to 1982, is no longer with us, Beasts lingered and developed a high reputation as a British horror television series, enticing the likes of myself to witness its six macabre tales as a one-off.

The programming of the episodes varies per version, but going from the DVD version that was used for this review, Baby opens the series, about an expecting young woman moving to a country cottage. Alarm bells should be heard when the cat is mewing like mad and runs away from the premises, not the last time an animal is not stupid enough to stay where danger is. The husband, who hated being a vet in the city, is headstrong and patronises her, the idea of her pregnancy affecting her emotions a gendered bias that she suffers through here, as he is impassioned by working with cattle now and in the countryside. When, in one of the walls they demolished, they find a strange desecrated corpse of an animal in a jar which is unlike anything either has seen, he thinks it is a fascinating item to show to his senior college than a warning of such a creepy entity even being in that wall in the first place. Kneale is known for nodding to folklore, such as how the most famous Quatermass story in either TV or Hammer film adaptation, Quatermass and the Pit, links old superstitions to aliens found under a London subway construction. In Baby, the female lead hears from the locals that the fields around her new home were notorious for something which caused cows to abort and chased people off using the area, with the suggestion the strange sheep-monkey creature in the jar as a supernatural tool for hexing people. All six episodes are TV production chamber pieces, having to work around not having elaborate special effects, and here, it is a psychological tale where the emphasis is on implicit fears barring the final practical effect. The lead being patronised as a pregnant woman is explicit as a theme, leading her to be isolated when an overtly supernatural end that explains the jar creature is fully formed.

Buddy-Boy for episode two is the more idiosyncratic tale, a weird tale that takes full advantage of the lack of practical effects and carefully chosen locations this story had used. This is about dolphins in the past tense, specifically the titular one of an old attraction long gone and now with the building being considered being bought by the new owners, who are running a club cinema to show porn. This reveals a surprise in its own as, whilst this series is not that violent and little cursing, this episode jars from the rest for how adult it is to the other five, in terms of the presentation of its story, but also scenes in an adult cinema with the decor not censored and even brief female nudity. It is not a detraction to bring this up, but instead as much part of the episode's distinct makeup, Buddy-Boy the most esoteric of the series but also the one dealing with some pretty heavy themes alongside these brief moments of edginess which do not feel tacked on. Dave (Martin Shaw), the one potential buyer who wants to keep a respectable business even with erotica, whilst his partner is even supposedly weighing the breasts of women he wants to get into porn films, is suspicious of how the owner of the building Hubbard (Wolfe Morris) is driven to drink and triggered by talk of Buddy-Boy. Buddy Boy was the rare American dolphin Hubbard acquired who started to rebel followed by the others starting to die when he did, not from disease or malnutrition but as if following him in rebellion.

When Dave encounters a woman strangely obsessed with Buddy-Boy and squatting secretly in the building, it is clear in his interactions with her and Hubbard to Dave that Hubbard "punished" Buddy-Boy and is haunted by him, wanting to get rid of the place ASAP. With a growing interest in the woman for her child-like love for Buddy-Boy, it is revealed he is using her to get Hubbard to sell the building to him cheaply, but Dave is becoming obsessed with what exactly happened to Buddy-Boy, initially for any dodgy dealings in Hubbard's past but finding himself dragged into this strange psychodrama. Most of the story is entirely a drama, barring the touch that in the building where Buddy-Boy died, disembodied dolphin sounds are heard and they are not inside just the woman's head as Dave hears them too. Including its bleak ending, where her mind is entirely for Buddy-Boy even when Dave tries to love her as a romantic figure, Buddy-Boy is the oddest episode and the one which is going to divide viewers. For me, it is one of the better episodes because of this.

A great episode immediately arriving afterwards, The Dummy is set on a horror film production, a period chillier about a giant bog-pig monster. A follow up to a series of Dummy films that has not had a sequel in a long while, a female film journalist writing of the production arrives when the actor in the suit, Clyde (Bernard Horsfall) is struggling emotionally - his wife has run off with the actor in a smaller role, and taken their daughter too, during Clyde's out-of-work period. The director was unaware of their bad blood, and the production is falling off the rails as this is revealed, forcing the producer, Clive Swift, to be called in. A stalemate transpires - the other actor refuses to leave his small role, but the costume was designed for only Clyde - and it is when the journalist gives the producer the idea, when talking of Clyde imbuing the Dummy costume with his personality like a ritualistic mask, to get Clyde drunk and riff on this idea. It proves too effective, and Clyde as the Dummy beast murders an extra in a scene and goes mad, continuing on with an episode that is really good.

In general, the series after its first episode, which is just a nice start, is consistently strong as with episode four, Special Offer, in which we follow a meek female employee of a supermarket, hassled by her male superior. Unfortunately compared to the other young female employee, who he is clearly having a relationship with, this is Carrie-adjacent though explicitly linked to the concept of poltergeists tapping into the emotional energy of people, as this meek younger woman dismissed as ugly and dumb by her colleagues, Noreen (Pauline Quirke), is effecting the strange circumstances happening the store, like cans of food rolling by their own will, or eventually actually destruction of the produce. What she calls after the mascot of the store's own brand, and possibly seen as a rat infestation at first, becomes far more unnatural as this progresses, with her bullying lead wanting to initially fire her, stoking the flames. When her emotional state is told to him by his senior, who has to accept the unnatural as part of the issues as a regular crisis in a store as matter-of-fact, to be effected by her crush on him, this puts him and his wandering eye against the mill stone.

Episode five, What Big Eyes, has the added star power of Patrick Magee, a North Irish actor many will likely know for his small but iconic role in A Clockwork Orange (1971), or in a variety of other places from Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963), to even a Lucio Fulci horror film partially shot in England, The Black Cat (1981). Inspector Curry (Michael Kitchen) is a new RSCPA officer, the real life group using those initials to represent the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and is eventually brought into Magee's experiments after the set up. Adamant to protect animals, Curry even ends up reading the records of an animal merchant he feels is suspicious, only to be surprised when Hungarian and Romania timber wolves are being sent to a tiny pet shop in town. He suggests to the pet shop owner herself, McGee's daughter, his suspicion someone is using their store name as a front for illegal animal smuggling but she, living absolutely devoted to her father without ever having her own life and being mocked by him, is complicit to his experiments which used the wolves. Magee is dubbed by Curry's senior officer as a crackpot scientist who believed Darwin got it wrong about evolution, and between being a specialist in lycanthropy and the title's Red Riding Hood reference, with his creation a "Grandma vaccine", it is clear what the episode is hinting at. The episode's decision to be very subjective of how this vaccine works, as Magee is using it on himself, becomes one of the best strengths of a strong episode.

Episode six, During Barty's Party, ends this series on a perfectly gruesome note, in which an older couple slowly grow paranoid in their house at night. The opening sets up that another couple, who were necking in the fields, are being attacked by some unknown form off-screen which the central female lead initially thinks is from a dream. The husband initially dismisses this as all her nerves, his pride felt when a rat is found under the floorboards of their home and refusing to be swallowed even when the situation becomes direr. However, as the radio tells them, there is supposedly a rat migration transpiring in the thousands on the march. Barty of the title is the unseen host of the radio show that plays through the story. Whilst there is one use of the word "retarded" which has not aged well, he is not dissimilar to modern hosts with their wisecracks and playfully goofy, which adds a nicely grim edge as, in-between a real pop song they licensed and the fake ads, he initially dismisses the rat migrations as more rats are heard under the central couples' floors. The additional touch, relevant to the time period but still disturbing, is a take on how species naturally adapt to resist poisons, only in this case the wife theorising the rats may have also developed a consciousness awareness of the humans who created the poisons and desired revenge. Without spoiling this episode, it is a macabre end to an insanely good anthology series. It comes with the knowledge that, just in the seventies alone when this one-off series came out, Kneale was also writing the likes of The Stone Tape (1972), so this was part of a decades' long strong career from that point between the fifties to the eighties, one where this would be a grand piece for any writers' career in television and film, but one of many that cemented his reputation.  

Waxworks (1924)

Director: Paul Leni

Screenplay: Henrik Galeen

Cast: Emil Jannings as Harun al-Rashid, Conrad Veidt as Ivan the Terrible, Werner Krauss as Spring-Heeled Jack, William Dieterle as The Poet / Assad the Baker / The Boyar, John Gottowt as the waxworks proprietor, Olga Belajeff as Eva / Maimune / the Boyar's bride

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Truthfully, Waxworks for most of its length is not really horror for most of its length, but is important to the canon of German Expressionist cinema. It is still a fascinating piece, an anthology story set up with moments that are purely macabre, set up around the figures of Harun al-Rashid, Ivan the Terrible and the fictional figure of Spring-Heeled Jack all co-existing as waxwork figures in an exhibition at a German carnival. The owner of the exhibit hires a man (William Dieterle) to write their exhibits' stories, building this anthology whilst falling for Eva (Olga Belajeff), the woman who works there. Its director, Paul Leni, would move to the US to make Hollywood films in the last stage of his career, tragically passing away before his time at forty four. He is also very important, alongside the figures who worked with him on and off the screen, for films which find themselves placed into the history of early horror cinema even if not their primary genre as with Waxworks.  Probably the most famous for its cultural influence is The Man Who Laughs (1928), a film which is not horror in genre, but fit into its iconography for the titular figure's iconic appearance, a known inspiration for the Batman villain The Joker.

Waxworks feels like a flex in terms of bringing together figures from the world of German cinema at its time, playing off to later horror anthologies for bringing in big names in their own stories as Harun al-Rashid is played by Emil Jannings, and the future Man Who Laughs, Conrad Veidt, playing Ivan the Terrible. Spring-Heeled Jack, played by Werner Krauss, is more an additional epilogue whilst the other two stories take up most of the film's length. This presents the issue now with Waxworks, as that means Jannings' story takes up a large part of the feature, and means you have to accept a film from a hundred years ago where German actors are playing Middle Eastern figures in brown face against an ancient Persian reality. Of an alternative reality to the actual Bagdad this is set in Harun al-Rashid, as played by Jannings as a cartoonish oaf, is a caliph eyeing the wife of a baker, learning of her when about to have the husband executed for ruining his chess games with the smoke from his work. Barring some actors playing servants, the cast is white actors, something we have to accept from an ancient film from a century ago, alongside the whole issue that some may not know that Harun al-Rashid is quite an important historical figure in terms of the Arabic world, making Jannings' take on him as a buffoonish womaniser, whilst from a great actor, not flattering at all.

It does not come off as racist in terms of mistral acting, to deliberately caricature these figures as harmful archetypes, but a now naive part of the past where the likes of the German film industry of that time, let alone Hollywood, dreamt of stories in these places considered exotic and sincerely wanted to tell the stories, but were at the time they cast actors in these roles regardless of them being white actors being made up into other ethnicities. It is a practice that happened in a few industries - like my bafflement why Rock Hudson kept being cast as Native Americans in the likes of Winchester '73 (1950) in the fifties despite it being plainly obvious he stood out like a sore thumb.  There is the difficulty to watch films like this, even great films, without rolling our eyes , when we rightly found common sense and cast characters based on the actors being of the appropriate ethnicity. Even by the late fifties, you have Fritz Lang's last films including The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (both 1959), fun films part of one single epic story, but bizarre nowadays as sincere Indian set adventure stories with white actors playing Indian characters on staged sets, when Jean Renoir from France, when making The River (1951), shot the film in India with Indian cast for Indian characters.

Sadly, even into the Millennium you can argue cinema was still doing this, but with Waxworks, it does need to be brought up because it is the first segment you have to watch, and some might be put off finish the rest of the work because of this aspect firmly showing it as an artefact. It is still fascinating, this artificially depicted haze of Bagdad architecture through the German Expressionism, but you could have easily dropped this into medieval Germany with a German lord for Emil Jennings to play, and no one a century later would have to bat an eye. Without the issue of crashing into the shores of reality, you still have a gleefully macabre farce in its centre which still works, as the baker is convinced by his wife to steal the caliph's magical wishing ring to prove his love for her, even if it means stealing a completely severed hand. Her character could be dismissed as another questionable stereotype, a two dimensional gold digger, if the story did not deliciously, for all its issues in setting choice, feel so modern still with its sick humoured farce ending. With a fake wax figure involved, there will be a way for man and wife to still stay together, but she and the caliph will be able to have the affair closer to his palace behind the baker's back as the newly appointed staff member. It is a final sick joke I have to admit won me over as being still impactful decades later.

Ivan the Terrible's story, even if not played by a Russian, gets away from these issues of casting for exotic locations to be a more twisted tale bordering into gothic psychodrama, near the horror genre, It is helped by the fact we have Conrad Veidt a Ivan, one of the best actors of that era of any country, whether as Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to, having to flee Germany during the Nazi era, his Hollywood era playing the likes of evil Nazi Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942). He immediately, even next to an acclaimed actor like Jannings, stands out, and in an era that can be dismissed for broad acting, gets over a bloody thirsty leader already bordering into insanity perfectly, one who even gets off, to be frank about it, about planning to have people murdered. When he believes his appointed poison maker is betraying him, the later realising his fate is doomed decides to set up a fatal hourglass to get his revenge on the leader. This was my personal favourite of the stories, a gristly tale appropriate for the horror genre even if not technically within it in terms of menace, as when not using an innocent older man as a stand in for an assassination attempt, he intends to steal the fiancée of another man as his own, who is in the midst of grieving for her father who was the stand-in. With Veidt playing the growing derangement, [Spoiler Warning] especially when the fatal hourglass does not poison him but leaves him going insane thinking he is by its sands [Spoilers End], it does feel like a great menacing piece.

In context, it also shows the incredibly production value and aura of German Expressionism. Their complete sense of artificially, turning snow bound Russia in the second story into a claustrophobic series of distorted rooms, is more and more magical as time passes as an aesthetic. Its Spring Heeled Jack ending, the name a reference to the English folklore figure whilst the character could be seen as closer to Jack the Ripper, is sadly short, with one wondering about how a take on either figure would look like in this era of cinema. It is still a good punch line of actual horror however, fully taking advantage of the aesthetics and techniques of silent cinema in general, with its leads now as themselves (rather than characters in each of the tales before) being terrified by this figure stalking them around the carnival, the sequence includes using such techniques as interposing actors so they look ghost-like. It adds a nice conclusion to Waxworks, not really a horror film altogether but with all these phantasmagorical moments which are eye-catching and memorable.

Satan Place: A Soap Opera from Hell (1988)

Directors: Scott Aschbrenner and Alfred Ramirez

Screenplay: Scott Aschbrenner, Melanie Johnson, Jeff Stogner and Alfred Ramirez

Cast: Warren Andrews as Edward Dayton / Human Hormoan (segment "Disposable Love"); Nora Miller as Doris Dayton (segment "Disposable Love"), Mark Rackstraw as Gordon Lighthand (segment "Disposable Love") / Dick Slasher / Thug #2 (segment "Too Much TV"), Sonja Etzel as Mother (segment "Too Much TV"), Hollis Wood as Johnnie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie"), Marsha Malone as Suzie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie"), Lisa Hatter as Sophie (segment "Say Goodnight, Sophie") / Daughter (segment "Too Much TV"), Jme Mestel as Jonathan (segment "Sally Satan")

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Missouri Mop Massacre. He can't stop them, and he doesn't do windows.

A woman with Bonnie Tylor hair, blasting shot-on-video budget rock riffs from her car stereo, asks for directions from a male chauvinist, she the interlinking figure herself between all the segments from this anthology horror film.

The first half focuses on the theme of chauvinist men stuck trying to dispose of corpses, the first story following said guy in the introduction, Eddie, in a grumpy mood and not interested in his wife Doris' lamp chops. She fantasies about shooting him in the head in a cowboy pastiche, and he only cares for watching TV and forcing his wife to get him beers, accidentally killing her with one punch over a warm can of brew. Whilst that may dangerous sound like trivialising domestic abuse, in context the film has him both as a terrible person, and within a film where (even if moments have not aged well) the tone is played with a sick comedic humour, with the moment playing as an abrupt moment of fake blood splatter and he stuck in a predicament which will doom him. Like a few SOV anthologies I have seen, they have minimal stories, here Eddie having to dispose of Doris' body, a farce as he considers placing her piece by piece in the trash, but going the weird direction of cooking her in the stove first beforehand. It is obvious where this goes, as he is able to live comfortably, watching porn in the lounge, only to be haunted by her ghost. Not even taking a bath is safe, for the bathwater turns into blood, nor going to the fridge as she tries to force feed him her own intestines' when he is there. It is also a reminder for me too how the trash disposal unit in kitchen sinks, a concept we never really had in my home country of Britain, was a trope for horror films and made me wonder as a result how they were considered safe.

It is pretty obvious, and we are not even dealing with the more elaborate tales you might get from Amicus in the golden age of horror anthologies of the sixties and seventies. The Bonnie Tylor woman has to deal with another sexist pig, kneeing him, who becomes another folly of these kind of men we follow, driving drunk listening to country music, calling his ex a bitch, and running over an old man whilst desperately calling a Mary-Lou at the steering wheel who is about to leave his life. He gets the old man to hospital, but claims the guy jumped out at his car as the old man dies in the hospital. It is obvious too where this is going, thought it has to be established Satan's Place, alongside really liking abrupt twist endings even if they do not make sense as for this story, is more interesting as an SOV production with the tropes they have. Openly a lot of my enjoyment of this one, as many others, is more the template, the atmosphere, of a homemade horror film even when the plots are abrupt and/or slight.

For a lower budget film, the production tries its best more than others in this field, including extensive use of various locations, and is scored to moody late eighties synth. As the film goes, a lot of its personality, including its humour, comes from the surprising amount of pastiche moments, additional original music, and TV/film parodies shot and shown in televisions in scenes that would have taken a lot of time to accomplish. For the second story, they even when out of their way, for a production with multiple collaborators in multiple roles, to use off-screen sprinkles for a rain effect, as our morally dubious Southern stereotype lead thinks he has ran over the old man again when he has just gotten over it, despite the old man being already dead.

Our Bonnie Tylor lead returns in a segment called Too Much TV, about the titular channel hosted by Dick Slasher, and changing the pace as it is about the landlady who Bonnie Tylor crosses who becomes the lead, angry her adult daughter spends all her time watching too much TV and not dating men to her ideal of Elvis Presley. This is the segment more explicitly about the pastiches and side jokes even if aspects of Satan's Palace's tone and humour have not aged well. It is not just that even between women the frequent use of the term "bitch" is used, but some of the explicit pastiches themselves, such as the questionable gay prison movie pastiche Bathroom Bullies with its dropping the soap moment, even if its depiction in feet shuffling back and forth and mouth popping noises in slapstick is absurd, to the first episode having Eddie watch a wrestling match between a transgender dwarf (not the language used) versus a wrestling with his hand puppet friends on both fists. The latter wrestler though is a funny joke which does show the better side of this film, the more overt sillier side which this does provide in spades. Too Much TV is the most scattershot of the anthology segments, as the daughter is watching horror movies like Don't Go into the Kitchen, or good jokes like the Hard Boy, the advertisement for disposable dildos for women. It is definitely the kind of anthology segment you only get from shot-on-video films which drift off in logic, even when it tries to pull a course ahead as Dick the TV host starts to talk deliberately to the daughter about offing her mother. With clearly a higher production, such as all the TV segments shown on television with the horror parodies, you manage to go from a Psycho parody in a bathtub or the mother being gunned down by random 1920s gangsters with typewriter machine guns in a fantasy, all of which including the segment's own abrupt ending, feeling like something you normally do not get outside this world of cinema.

Sally Satan ends the anthology, Bonnie Tylor finally getting her own story, with a suitor named Jonathan visiting and perturbed by the cobwebs around the wine bottles, what looks like a bloody head being cooked in the microwave for dinner, and newspaper clippings about a murder found in the coffee table book for guests to page through whilst waiting. Clearly, the title Sally Satan is an indicator of something Satanic involved, as he lays on her bed in briefs, shirt and socks, all black, reading poetry at one point oblivious to this whilst the score of a NES fantasy RPG is repeating sweetly in the background. He will make the ill advised decision to be willingly tied up, and not even ask for a condom before Satan is announced to be coming.

Like the others, another abrupt twist ending out of nowhere happens, and as mentioned, Satan's Place: A Soap Opera from Hell is not really scary, more eccentric than humorous, and was yet my jam for this pure dose of homemade filmmaking with its own tangents. It also only goes over sixty seven minutes long, which is a huge help to prevent anything from being a miserable slog. Those few jokes which did not age well neither feel like they are truly cruel either, just reminders of this being an older film from the eighties, a long time ago. It becomes clearly, with its end credits, notwithstanding Hubert the Cat in a cameo of the mog licking a corpse kept in the bathroom, too an absolute collaborate effort which I have to admire, with a female co-writer Melanie Johnson as a producer, and one of the director/co-writers Scott Aschbrenner composing the music with another person named Jon Kay, which means even the brief Elvis Presley pastiche you get just for a single scene mention of him, and would have taken time to record, was a work of love from a figure who also helped direct and write the film around the scene. That again really emphasises the amount of hard work put into this film, the only one for the directors. It is an obscure Shot-on-Video title, and sadly might be a difficult one still to locate a proper release of, but for fans of the genre like myself,  you watch them even if imperfect for that sense of hard work.

Deadtime Stories (1986)

 

Director: Jeffrey Delman

Screenplay: Jeffrey Delman, J. Edward Kiernan and Charles F. Shelton

Cast: Scott Valentine as Peter, Nicole Picard as Rachel, Matt Mitler as Willie, Cathryn de Prume as Goldi Lox, Melissa Leo as Judith "MaMa" Baer, Kathy Fleig as Miranda, Phyllis Craig as Hanagohl, Michael Mesmer as Uncle Mike, Brian DePersia as Little Brian, Kevin Hannon as Beresford "Papa" Baer, Timothy Rule as Wilmont "Baby" Baer, Anne Redfern as Florinda

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You little vixens! A bit of bondage aye?

Returning to horror anthologies, Deadtime Stories stems from a father trying to get his son to sleep rather than jump up and down on his bed over the night, presenting a really eccentric trio of fairy tale reinterpretations. This is set up from just the opening credits. If you ever wanted to hear a metal guitar licked tale, from the mid eighties, of the three little pigs and other tales, these credits are for you as it also emphasises the absurd tone ahead, a literal song evoking Hitchcock and George Romero, and how our bedtime tales as kids induced terror and were violent. The first story is about a young man named Peter, Scott Valentine early in a career before he would star in the likes of Family Ties, between seasons 4 through 7, sold into servitude to two witches. A period story in medieval times, if full of eighties hair, none of these stories have anything really elaborate to them, as he is assigned to get a guy over to their lair, a randy priest no less, under the belief two lovely ladies are there in a cave randomly to sex him. Intoxicating the priest and taking a severed hand from him, the witches intend to use it as the beginning of their plan to locate their sister's grave, to resurrect her. It is a very simple tale, a maiden being prepared for a sacrifice, which plays to a sense of humour. It also shows one of the few moments of elaborate special effects which, when they appear, are a surprise in their elaborateness and willingness to be gory too.

From here on, the tales Uncle Mike tells to his nephew Brian become more unconventional, in contrast to a medieval Europe with access to hairspray, as he is missing the Miss Nude Vampire competition on TV. His take Little Red Riding Hood involves a sexy high school grad named Rachel coming home from cheerleading practice, played by Nicole Picard, having lustful thoughts imagining her reflection as her boyfriend when introduced, whose red cloak is a red hoodie for jogging. You would presume that this take on the wolf, played by Matt Mitler of the slasher The Mutilator (1984), in tight leather pants and a leather skinny tie, is a junkie who gets the wrong "medicine" from a shady drug store employee and our lead Rachel's grandmother getting what was intended for him. Then however he turns into an actual werewolf, and you get this anthology is wacky by this point.

Wacky is the word for Deadtime Stories in general, which I appreciate for the fact that it never becomes lazy and conventional even if the stories are absurd and pure cheese. It is a one-off as I never expected this to be as eccentric as this became, which you especially see with the final story. This is a weird take on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and the "Baer" family are a father and son, known for crimes, being bust out of an asylum by the mother, only topped by the fact that Goldilocks (Cathryn de Prume) is a serial killer, with various decaying male suitors around her current home, and also has psychic powers. Truthfully, Deadtime Stories never lives up to the potential of an anthology, in making the stories really stand out, and this story is less horror than a bizarre dark comedy. It is a premise that could have been enough as a weird cult eighties film you dig up decades later on a streaming service, but even that is a compliment for the third story, as ridiculous as it sounds and memorable in the slight form you can see it through here.

For those wanting to watch an eccentric horror film from the eighties, this segment is the one which lives up to that promise, if you want something which plays as a strange comedy segment rooting on murderers. A film like this would only be made in the lower budget straight to streaming/DVD world nowadays. That is not a detriment to those later films, but with the sheen of an independently made New York production, this definitely has a tone which is lost when the budget for a production like this would not be the same a decade on. It was a film I had no expectations for, never expected it to be this eccentric, and glad for this when I have sat through some generic work when randomly selecting a film to watch. Least with this, you find yourself reading these premises and, whilst not necessarily the best anthology segments in terms of elaborate stories, I can confirm they least had a personality.

The World YAMIZUKAN (2017)

 

Director: Noboru Iguchi

Screenplay: Noboru Iguchi, Oolongta Yoshida, Takashi Iizuka and Uuronta Yoshida

Voice Cast: Takumi Saitou as the Storyteller

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

The really obvious aspect, if surprising thing to learn of, that needs to be brought up is that the director is that Noboru Iguchi behind The Machine Girl (2008), who has been a collaborator with the studio behind this micro-series a few times, studio ILCA. The Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories franchise is one of their longest (and ongoing) works, over multi series adapting short horror stories told in a way based on the kamishibai method of story-telling, street storytellers who used illustrated miniature stages, with YAMIZUKAN being very much the more explicitly inspired by Western (especially American) horror tropes. The best way to approach this series too, for the best experience, is to not try to take it all  seriously, as some of the plot twists in this work are clearly ridiculous on purpose. Still gleefully macabre, there are however times where this feels like a send-up on the genre, and to those who can appreciate even the plot twists that come out of nowhere, this will be a worthwhile experience just in terms of the experimentation in the varying animation and illustration styles brought in too. Even live action to really catch viewers off guard.

 

For the full review, follow the blog link HERE.

Pet Shop of Horrors (1999)

 

Director: Toshio Hirata

Screenplay: Yasuhiro Imagawa

Based on the manga by Matsuri Akino

(Voice) Cast: Masaya Onosaka as Leon Orcot; Toshihiko Seki as Count D; Hiroshi Yanaka as Mr. Hayward; Kouji Tsujitani as Robin Hendrix; Miho Yamada as Q-Chan; Miki Itō as Louise; Mitsuaki Madono as Roger Stanford; Mitsuru Miyamoto as Kelly Vincent; Narumi Hidaka as Nancy; Ryūzaburō Ōtomo as the Kirin; Satsuki Yukino as Jill; Sayuri Yoshida as Alice; Sho Hayami as Jason Grey

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

Among the many anime adaptations of horror manga I wish had lasted longer, as a one off four episode television production, Pet Shop of Horrors is a good example. An anthology series all centered around a supernatural pet shop, these four tales of “be careful what you wish for” fully commit to bleak endings and introspection as the choices made by the customers with their pets, always breaking the contracts, cause pause for thought as much as means Count D, our ethereal (and cake loving) androgynous anti-hero, is technically not culpable if anyone dies for breaking the rules that Gremlins also warned of in not feeding the mogwai after midnight. This original manga still continued over multiple series, but sadly the anime did not, in real need of another adaptation down the line to expand these tales.

For the full review, follow the link here.

Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001)

 

Created by: Graham Duff

Directors: Matt Lipsey

Screenplays: Steve Coogan, Graham Duff and Henry Normal

Cast: Steve Coogan as Dr. Terrible / Captain Tobias Slater / Lester Crown / Denham Denham / Dr. Donald Baxter / Nathan Blaze / Captain Hans Brocken; Graham Duff as Josh / Norden / a Policeman / a Porter; Sarah Alexander as Beatrice Crown; Sally Bretton as Carmina; Julia Davis as Stephanie Wise; John Thomson as Sir Donald Tyburn; Louise Paige as Nurse MacReedy; Warwick Davis as Tygon

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

That day, I learnt an important lesson. Never eat your own chin. Had I feasted on my own chin, I'd be ill-equipped to introduce tonight's tale.

In terms of digging up a real obscurity, finding the time when Steve Coogan was co-writer and centre stage on a parody of horror anthology shows, and British pulp and horror stories, is pretty significant as a find. Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible is the creation of Graham Duff, an English writer/actor/producer. Steve Coogan, for those with no idea who he is, is an actor/comedian/screenwriter whose legacy includes Alan Partridge, a character of his and co-creator Armando Iannucci, over multiple productions and multi-media, who became a phenomenon alongside Coogan's extensive career in other productions such as his roles in 24 Hour Party People (2002). This, six episodes broadcast on BBC 2, was released on DVD, but has become an obscurity. He, alongside playing all the protagonists, plays the host Dr. Terrible, a horror show guide who, with his Count Orlok ears and fake teeth, contemplates in the first episode I saw his dreams of an erotic kind. He is a perversion of a senile old man who steals his deceased wife's coffin and has witnessed other macabre things like a man eating his own chin as his monologues suggest, alongside befitting that a show like this needs a macabre host.

Even the BBC DVD played a trick that, unlike the original broadcast order, episodes one and four were switched, leaving me with And Now the Fearing as the first tale, a story set in 1972 where Steve Coogan plays a sleazy businessman named Denham Denham, part of him clearly having it as part of the roles to have as many fake hair pieces, or hair stylists involved, per episode as he can. Denham, a feminist female reporter (Julia Davis) and an architect (Alexander Armstrong) are stuck in a lift which is heading towards a thirteenth floor which should not be there. A possible spoiler, but this is clearly Tales from the Crypt (1972), the Amicus anthology horror film, crunched into less than thirty minutes, including the punch line, whilst also being a parody of such Amicus and anthology films from the era.

It also presents that a) Coogan and the co-writers clearly like these types of films despite the piss taking that comes through all six episodes, and that b) unfortunately one of the clear problems, and likely why the series did not work, comes ahead in that this is a wildly inconsistent work. When this hits, it is funny, but when it misses the mark, this show has aged badly and is also broad as a brick. And Now the Fearing also sets this up with an alternative world scenario, if this had gained a cult audience and worked, of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) before Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness created it, and if interpreted by Steve Coogan, of pastiching cheesy horror tales of the past, which is bizarre to consider. For my reservations with Darkplace that it played to "ironic bad" for its humour, thankfully, we got the timeline with that series, and this makes a lot more mistakes. Here you see that, for half the episodes of House of Horrible, the broad tone in comparison does not land as well. Feeling strange as an early 2000s television production trying to replicate the nineteen seventies, stranger for an inexplicable reason than any of the older periods being tackled, the production feels like it is going for the obvious jokes which do not work. The stories themselves could have worked - one's drunken hit-and-run of a homeless man damning you in a cycle, why you never try to cheat gypsies from their land, and the most openly silly like a Darkplace joke, why never to purchase a haunted table. But the tone is off, and it is only by the end of the series the show hits the point of itself premise.

Curse of Tongs, set in Limehouse in London in 1910, is not an episode to help as it is a Fu Manchu parody, which even if played for irony to damn it, is damned in itself by playing to it. Whilst a broad parody of "Yellow Peril" xenophobia of the infamous Sax Rohmer character, I had to think about what the Chinese cast to this episode thought of all this, as this is still as a parody a Fu Manchu pastiche, with actor Mark Gatiss in yellow face as Hangman Chang. Kidnapping the love of Steve Coogan's Nathan Blaze, Coogan is also still playing the heroic white savour over the Chinese villains in something which, for the 2000s, really shows that ironically playing with these themes was not a lesson that succeeded at this time period, more so as, alongside the sixties films when Christopher Lee played the figure, Peter Sellers played Fu Manchu in a comedy in 1980 called The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Not even having a Chinese detective on the heroes' side works to undercut this as, not even a sidekick, the character barely appears onscreen.

The legacy of Fu Manchu is more uncomfortable in mind that, whilst Sax Rohmer was a good pulp writer for tales like Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), he was also a figure ingested with the xenophobia of his time, and as a British writer, I cannot help but feel more uncomfortable, even as someone who has found enjoyment in Fu Manchu tales, knowing it stems from not only British xenophobia, but also our really problematic relationship to China into the 20th century beforehand. A character like Fu Manchu, whose first tale was published in 1912, stems from British colonial influence as much as the fear of the East coming to the West, after the likes of the Boxer Rebellion - an anti-foreign, anti-colonial, and anti-Christian uprising in China between 1899 and 1901 - and that, in mind to the scene here where Coogan is forced to become an opium addict by Hangman Chang, Britain is the villain for me as an Englishman in the two Opium Wars. The two Opium Wars, the First Opium War fought in 1839–1842 between Qing China and the United Kingdom, the Second Opium War fought between the Qing and the United Kingdom and France, 1856–1860, were the result of Western groups like the British trying to force opium trade on the Chinese. A parody in 2001 about this, ironically done, cannot work because I learnt this history in my university days in lectures, and even if I had not, as mentioned, it still involves Mark Gatiss in yellow face playing an Asiatic evil. Even the amusing special effects for the giant crab Tong has in the sewer, nor his secret crab claw hand, can help get over this.

Episode three, Curse of the Blood of the Lizard of Doom, can be argued to be as bad as an episode, in its many cheap jokes about red heads and the Scottish, the later likely as offensive just for the fake Scottish accent. It is also compellingly ridiculous. In Edinburgh 1880, Coogan plays a specialist burns doctor, Dr. Donald Baxter, who is experimenting with reptile plasma (at one point even gecko rectal fluid) to treat burns, even if it accidentally leads to patients developing webbed fingers and a need to crawl on the ceiling. There are more ironic sexism jokes as in the first episode, but for what is, frankly, an eye rolling parody, at least in this tale the humour is more about Coogan experimenting with lizards to treat burns, with a female doctor he begrudgingly works with, throwing caution to the wind in how silly it is. Chameleon plasma is experimented on, and alongside a man hanging himself with his own extending tongue, or trying to bluff around a conference with colleagues by incinerating a body of a man meant to have been a live patient, Coogan experimenting on himself leads to him turning into a giant chameleon, This is compellingly bad at least.

Episode four, in Upper Carpathians 1877 and the original first episode, is Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust, entirely based on Hammer's Karnstein trilogy. The trilogy - The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971) - are the children of the famous 1872 novella Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. It is a text which has gained greater weight as becoming an LGBTQ novel of gay desire between women, if in mind this period into the seventies, when Hammer were trying to sell their films on more sex, one should consider these movies from heterosexual film producers from the perspective they may have only included the content in a titillating way, not any possible interpretation from female scholars which could find more of note within the films, or the legacy of Carmilla as a story which gained weight over centuries in meaning.

This is again another premise which could pose problematic, as with a female vampire countess eyeing Coogan's newly wedded bride, the vampires are gay, even their human servant Rebenor, played by Ben Miller, a dapperly dressed and flamboyant figure who even makes a dress he stole from someone else look stylish. However it is fascinating it never touches the subject at all barring its source material as a parody, more interested in a lot of sexual innuendo as has also been common in the series. With the sense the series improved considerable by the halfway point, this is an openly silly pastiche, just from the get-go in having Coogan with his blue eyes and Hugh Grant hairstyle playing a heroic lead that is mostly useless. Sadly, the older female Van Helsing stand-in does not last long, but the tone, including the bombastic choral score, or the ending based around Steve Coogan playing tongue hockey by himself by a mirror, means this comes off as one of the strongest episodes.

In mind that was originally the first episode, the last two episodes of the series show the tone was improving. Episode 5, Voodoo Feet of Death, is also one of the stronger episodes too barring, however, it is parodying voodoo tropes in cinema, which is a huge issue as, with horror's longstanding history of demonising an actual religion, I do feel uncomfortable with even this parody. Even if I enjoy my old horror films - and will always think fondly of George Zucco playing bongos in Voodoo Man (1944) with Bela Lugosi - this is not woke for the sake of it, just admitting embarrassment at how narrow minded this area of storytelling can be, even accidentally as a parody of this narrow-mindedness. It also has no point in being included, barring the voodoo priest who demands Coogan returns his late brother's feet so they can be purified of the evil slowly corrupting their new host. The premise is strong enough as it is without the "voodoo" aesthetic, that this is The Feet of Orlac, or The Hands of Orlac (1924), which was remade as a 1960 British film, where Conrad Veidt, as a concert pianist, loses his hands in a horrible accident only to have experimental hand transplants that. To his horror, they may have once belonged to a murderer. This works with just parodying this, set in the 1920s, where there is a romantic triangle between Coogan, playing a dancer named Lester Crown, his wife and a trendy new tap dancer. An ill-advised scouting of possible adultery, involving a giant novelty barbershop pair of scissors, leads to a moment of comically levels of fake blood spurting and experiment feet transplants, taken from a dock worker who was crushed under a heavy crate baring those appendages.

The joke of sentient feet that kill is inherently funny by itself, and no one suspects that feet can strangle a person, or that extra long toe nails can slice a jugular in one swipe, which adds to this humour. It proves one of the funnier episodes, as does Episode 6, Scream Satan Scream, Coogan playing a Witchfinder General in 1645 Blackburn, who is burning witches and those who inappropriately use vegetables. Captain Tobias Slater is also a sex hound who is abusing his power, masquerading under finding witches to bed as many women he can within one location at a time. Throughout the show, there had been sexual innuendo, but Scream Satan Scream fully embraced this, to the point there is literally an inn called Fist Inn as a setting. With a curse over his head from a previous witch he burnt in the first scenes, this is a very funny episode, arguably the best as it embraces blatant sex comedy, Coogan playing a villain, and Warwick Davis makes a suddenly and welcomed appearance as his assistant Tygon, clearly a reference to Tigon British Film Productions, who released Witchfinder General (1968), the Vincent Price witch hunter film which this is parodying. Sadly, Davis does not have lines, but when the camera cuts to him in close up reacting to Coogan, it is perfect in itself.

Embracing its silliness, where Satan ends up looking like a Jan Švankmajer project, superimposed onto the screen when the Dark Lord is briefly summoned, this is what Dr. Terrible's House of Horror should have been. Not ironic attempts to mock racism or sexism of the past in horror and pulp cinema, the jokes tightened, just embrace the crude sexual innuendo, and just run with the silliest ideas possible, like The Feet of Orlock or Coogan reimagining Vincent Price's Witchfinder General just scrapping past being dunked in a river as a witch himself. There is a clear sense the people made this admire the horror cinema they parody, from the elaborate animated opening credits, and in how there is even a cameo in And the Fearing Starts of Sheila Keith, from Frightmare (1974) and House of Whipcord (1974). The show sadly faltered many times because, as I have found in other work, a lot of its humour was cheap ironic pastiches, and jokes, including enough Scottish stereotypes in one episode to fill a tin of shortbread. There was also content as well that show we did not really progress well in the 2000s in our humour as we thought we did, and other times where it did not work at all just as a joke. It is fascinating, and when it rewards, it is very funny. It is, as mentioned, that one Steve Coogan work, from a man who is an institution for many nowadays, which I have never heard brought up, as mysterious as that sounds.