CHILLERAMA **

USA: Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Adam Rifkin and Tim Sullivan, 2011

IMDB reference

Seeing as I love a good anthology horror film and reflecting on what a rarity modern portmanteau movies are I was gutted to miss out on this at last year's FrightFest. Having now seen CHILLERAMA I realise my folly in thinking this might have been worth missing the last train home for and my condolences for those that did brave the twilight screening. This just might be my biggest disappointment of the entire festival.

Things get off to a rather spirited start with a suitably grim title sequence but any gothic mood is almost immediately undone by a painfully laughless and puerile opening scene shot in lifeless black and white photography. This soon skews into a colorised framing story set at an old fashioned drive-in theatre populated by irritatingly vapid characters who take turns to deliver forced cine-literate lines that will make your heart sink.

All pretence that CHILLERAMA might actually equal the omnibus films from which it is derived is soon dispensed with as the words 'Wadzilla' appear onscreen. Aiming somewhere between the humour of the giant Boob running amok in Woody Allen's EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK and the nostalgia of fifties SF B-movies, 'Wadzilla' succeeds in raising a chortle but overstays its welcome all too soon. Painfully, one note the gags run dry well before the short running time.

Next up is the amateurish tedium 'I Was Once Teenage Warebear'.
Whatever good feeling 'Wadzilla' managed to raise in its audience this crass comedic farce soon replaces with fatigue as the wheels fall off this segment pretty much as soon as it begins. Thankfully, the stupid but entertaining 'Diary of Anne Frankenstein' soon arrives and saves this mediocrity from being a one-star film.

Sadly though, the tired closing 'Zom B Movie' which brings this anthology to a laboured close epitomises the lacklustre approach of CHILLERAMA. Devoid of genuine scares, laughs or ideas the filmmakers stubbornly go for gross out per-pubescent cock and fart jokes ad nausea until you begin to appreciate why so few horror anthologies are now made.

The Count's Verdict: If you've the appetite for horror anthologies you'll check this out. Just go in with your brain in your ballsack and an expectation only that CHILLERAMA will pass the time.