A group of strangers stranded in an eerie bus station in the middle of the night, decide to swap scary stories until the bus to their final destination arrives - and I DO mean final! I find this a lot of fun and quite lovable despite, or perhaps because of how cheap and corny it is. I remember first seeing this macabre oddity many years ago late at night on the uk Horror Channel and for whatever reason I'd always find myself watching it and getting a weird Twilight Zone feeling because of just how bloody strange a little movie it is! It's a cobbled together mess for sure, technically awful, but still something about it speaks to me, it has an earnest kind of joy about itself, it wasn't just plodding through the motions and you feel like they really were trying to make a fun scary silly time, and for the most part, I do find it a fun and charmingly silly anthology to sit through, despite its many shortcomings! So about the stories, well for me none of them are all that good exactly, they're very stunted and held back by the production values and the acting, some actors more so than others, and the punchlines of the stories are hackneyed and delivered very clumsily and without the right kind of macabre flair, but what they do all have is a colourful ghoulish villain in them, like the evil ghost of a dead swim champ, a demented escaped maniac posing as a scout leader, a sexy charming vampire and his goth rock chick partner in crime, a psycho killer unwittingly brought back from the dead, and a girl possessed by the vicious bloodthirsty spirit of an Aztec goddess on the rampage! The stories are all really quick and to the point and pretty fast paced so they're usually over before you can get really sick of them. The ones I liked the most were the one with the haunted pool, I thought it was really creepy at points, and the one where the guy had the hokey power to bring someone back to life he sees in the obituaries because the acting of the gentleman that played the very ungrateful resurrected serial killer was so hilarious, his hammy delivery and facial expressions were on par with the great Eric Freeman of Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 fame! I love the setup of the wraparound segments and how it very much seems like they're all in purgatory on the road to hell but at the last minute there's a neat twist upon the twist where it's revealed that everything was just one big nightmare of a very imaginative little kid! Way to pull the rug out from under your audience but I do love that ending, Came as a genuine surprise! So while there are many more beloved and far better made horror anthology movies out there to enjoy, Chillers is nevertheless what I'd call a minor hidden gem and it is a nice little window of sorts into a weird shot on video anything goes vhs horror era that doesn't really exist anymore, everything's so wonderfully tacky and cheesy, compared to the bigger budgeted classic stuff movies like this are like the real troll films hiding under the proverbial bridge, but they need a little love to ya know! I like this kooky little anthology movie, it's cheap and goofy but overall a fun surreal time, one that you lean to love! X.
Review of Chillers
