If there's one thing there's never a shortage of this time of year, it's horror anthologies. I just described one a couple of entries back that takes place "in real time", Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Last night I watched the legendary Trick r' Treat, and last year Frani and I viewed Tales of Halloween, but for some damn reason I didn't write it up for the holidays movie entries.
Tonight we watched Nightmare Cinema. A great piece of collaboration, sparked by Mick Garris and including his work along with that of Joe Dante, David Slade, Alejandro Brugues, and Ryuhei Kitamura. This flick doesn't really miss.
It seems the Rialto theatre is run by "the projectionist", a goofy-ass Mickey Rourke. The cinema pulls in people who eventually seem to get stuck watching their own nightmares come true on screen. Each one being an individual story in this piece. I've read how some critics say the film is hit and miss, and I gotta disagree.
Oddly, the one I liked the least is from Kitamura, and it's not exactly trash. It's a pretty solid story of a small parochical school that is the stage for demonic battles. David Slade's This Way to Egress is a story of a woman who seems to have slipped out of her dimension of reality and is terrific and disturbing. Brugues' The Thing in the Woods is a hodgepodge of all things horror with a chunk of laughter tossed in for good measure.
And Dante and Garris ring in with their elements of style.
The two veteran chefs of this macabre soup are on their game completely. Dante brings the grim and borderline nasty humor that he's known for, and Garris tugs at the heartstrings while playing the suspense violin he's developed a career with. I don't know if Nightmare Cinema is Garris attempting to start up another class of Masters of Horror, but if it is, I'll be the last to complain.
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