TAD 2011 – The Theatre Bizarre (2011)

The third film on day 4 at Toronto After Dark 2011 was the point of the fest where I started to be continuously surprised. I had assumed that The Theatre Bizarre would be a great anthology filled with blood and guts. It certainly has its share of the red stuff, but what surprised me was just how smart, sharp, and creative some of the shorts were.

A lot of the segments steered clear of excessive blood, although each one contained at least one little bit of violence. My favorite segment ended up being one in which there was almost no blood at all. I can’t really explain each and every segment, as there were seven including the wraparound segment, but I’ll try to touch on my favorites and give an overall idea of the film.

First of all, it’s always hard to lose with an anthology flick. I like to remind people that if you don’t like one segment, it’ll be over in about 10 minutes and you can get to the next one. This did happen a few times in The Theatre Bizarre as some of the shorts weren’t as good as others. I wasn’t very fond of Tom Savini’s segment Wet Dreams, which was a strange mix of dream and reality as an unhealthy relationship leads to a painful resolution. Richard Stanley’s segment, The Mother of Toads, also didn’t do much for me. David Gregory’s short, Sweets, started out pretty strong and ended in a very strange, and skin crawling, kind of way. It sat in the middle between the best and worst that The Theatre Bizarre had to offer.

The wraparound story was perfectly creepy even if it was fairly predictable.

Finishing close to the top was the Karim Hussain directed Vision Stains which follows a woman who is killing other woman at their lowest points in life. Homeless, drug addicts, and forgotten women with mental problems are her prey, but not for the sheer joy of killing. Kaniehtiio Horn is The Writer, the woman killing other women so she can record their life stories. She does this by draining their eye fluids just as they’re dying and injecting it into her own eye. She then witnesses their life and records it all in her growing stack of journals. When she attempts to perform that same ritual on an unborn fetus, she realizes that she’s gone too far.

It was very well done and had an impressive story idea. It also managed to make the theatre squirm as you watch the needle pierce the eye of its victims, slowly sucking the juice out of their eye and causing it to collapse. Lucio Fulci, eat your heart out!

Buddy Giovinazzo directs my second favorite segment, I Love You. It involves a woman who has cheated on her husband returning to her apartment with her new lover. She’s come to get her belongings but has to deal with her husband first. She’s brutal in her honesty which only causes her husband to become more and more desperate. It ends in a spectacular fashion and slightly reminded me of Giovinazzo’s film Combat Shock. It looked great, shot in an apartment that is almost gleaming white, which only adds to the blood that is soaked into every moment.

This is about the most blood shown in the short The Accident, and it also managed to be my favorite.

The Accident, directed by Douglas Buck, is my favorite of the film. There’s very little blood in the story about a young girl who questions her mother about death while we’re shown how the girl was a witness to a terrible motorcycle accident that also involved a deer. It’s such an uncomfortable topic, and one that hit home with me since I have children, but it’s treated in a kind of sweet way. Something that can only be done because the story involves a child. It’s a bit heartbreaking as the mother and daughter talk about death and why it has to happen.

With the relatively bloodless segment of The Accident becoming my favorite, I was surprised at how well done most of the segments were. I had mistakenly assumed that we’d be treated to over the top gore from the first moment. Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of gory moments, but there are also just as many quiet, thoughtful moments as well. It’s a great blend of bloody and beautiful and is probably one of the best anthologies that I’ve ever seen.

In the shadows – Will