Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3.0 out of 5 stars
A WEAK FILM THAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER, 26 Oct 2007
Four stories are told in a regular, unlinked anthology series as chapters in the film.
The Good Stor(ies): The Benediction-Suffering a crisis of faith, Father Frank MacLeod, (Lance Henriksen) decides to leave his church and take a trip across the desert. While traveling, he repeatedly comes across a large black truck that tries to run him off the road. When he comes to believe that the truck might be linked to his change of believe, he tries to stay alive against the demonic truck. While it's true that this one has zero suspense and a given unsurprising-surprise ending, this is still a lot of fun. Seeing a bunch of vehicular slaughter is never a bad thing, and the chasing adds some dimensions of suspense to the proceedings. The truck isn't that creepy but has a nice aura of menace, and the shot of it tunneling underground and bursting through is a spectacular surprise. While hard to really understand, it's quite enjoyable.
Night of the Rat-After a succession of creepy noises haunt the household, Claire Houston, (Veronica Cartwright) and husband Steven, (Richard Masur) believe they have rats in the house, and after killing one, he says that the problem is solved. As the noises continue, only more destructive, they are forced to believe that this isn't a normal rat. Easily the best one of the stories, this one is pretty creepy. As the noises grow more and more obnoxious, the idea of what's behind it all is really creepy. The destruction it causes allows for plenty of nice chills, and there's even an encounter underneath the house that is really quite spooky. There's even the obligatory conflict in the darkened house that provides some great moments in there as well, and overall, this is a pretty creepy segment. The rat is never believable, but it's on-screen so shortly it doesn't really matter.
The Bad Stor(ies): Terror in Topanga-After a serial killer escapes from custody, Lisa, (Christina Raines) decides to go out for some cigarettes. After meeting several people she thinks is the killer, she stops off at a gas station. Aware the killer is there, she fights to stay alive against the maniac. This here is just mainly plagued by how short it is. It's barely twenty minutes long and the final confrontation is quite short. Everything else is fine, it just really needed to stretch out and breathe. It is the goriest entry, with a couple of murders spread in that result in a brutal stabbing in the hand, a knife thrust repeatedly into the chest, and a gory gunshot wound, and the initial encounter is pretty creepy when the killer emerges suddenly with a loud shriek. This just needed more time.
Bishop of Battle-Desperately wanting to beat a video game, JJ Cooney, (Emilio Estevez) spends all of his time playing the game. When it gets the better of him, he sneaks back and tries it again, only for the game to spout a new twist he wasn't expecting. Easily the weakest one of the stories, this one suffers mainly from two main flaws. The main one is that this is simply isn't scary. There's nothing in here that generates any suspense or chills at all, and with it being based so steeply in a certain sub-culture, unless you're well-versed in that culture, it will simply blow over you and not scare you. The other flaw is that the film is so predictable and easy-to-predict that anything that might generate suspense gets washed away when knowing how it will end. It does have a decent firefight in a video game room, but it's not enough to save it.
The Final Verdict: With two really good ones, one that's bearable and one that really shouldn't be there, this is a decent enough anthology series that will probably serve some entertainment value for some out there. There's far worse ones out there, so give it a shot if this is your kind of thing.
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With an Amazon.co.uk 
