I was fairly cool on this early Mario Bava entry in our “Not Scared of Subtitles” Halloween month—which still beats the tar out of Rocktober, which was the theme they always ran with prior to last year, as I explained to the kids:

1. Horror anthology movies are almost never good
2. Because anthology movies are usually built around one story that’s not long enough
3. And so they’re padded out with lesser quality stories
4. And tonally they tend to be very uneven, which compromises the atmosphere

Wild Tales is easily the best anthology movie I’ve ever seen, and it is very good (though barely horror). But others? I ran through a few in my mind—the ’80s were a treasure trove of horror anthologies, probably due to the success of Creepshow. But even Creepshow was a mixed bag. It had five stories, can you remember them all? There’s the very boring opener (“Tide”) with Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson…which I think is not the one where the guy wants his cake. I think that might be the third or fourth story, or might not be in that anthology at all. The second one, where Stephen King graces us with his screen presence and a shameless lift of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Colour out of Space”, is dopey and tonally goofy. The only really effective one is the last one, with E.G. Marshall as a Howard Hughes type who is being tormented by cockroaches. And I think the Adrienne Barbeau/Hal Holbrook monster-in-a-crate story is in this one, too.

(Checks.)  OK, I did pretty good, apart from utterly forgetting the bookends and bumpers. Those are all five of the stories. But “Tide”, “Cake” and “Colour” are so hack as to make it nigh unbelievable that they’re actually in a modern movie. Tonally, they are campy. “Crate” is lifted by Barbeau’s harrowing performance as a World Class Shrew, and E.G. Marshall carries “Roach”.

And Creepshow is the most famous and possibly the best modern horror anthology. The ’70s had a bunch, like Tales from the Crypt (sans the crypt keeper) and The Vault of Horror (which I remember as having some very effective moments) as well as the generally well regarded TV movie Trilogy of Terror, which features Karen Black in all three stories. And Creepshow inspired a lot of TV shows (like Tales from the Darkside) and some feature anthologies like Nightmares, Cat’s Eye, The Twilight Zone Movie, Deadtime Stories and From A Whisper To A Scream—as well as a bunch you’ve never heard of. And if you have heard of these, and even seen them, can you remember them? If you can remember all the stories in any of them, I’m more likely to be impressed by your recall than your taste. Nightmares has…Emilio Estevez playing “The Bishop in Battle” which is a reference obscure enough to mention a call out in Ernest Cline’s Armada, God Save Us All.

I can’t back it up, but I feel like the horror anthology started in ’60 and has been going on consistently, with some peaks and valleys ever since. There’s a zillion of them these days, for much the same reason Black Sabbath was made: They’re cheap to do. Anyway, I think you get my point: Instead of being collections of highly polished gems, anthologies tend to not work all that well together and tend to be a few half-baked notions gathered around one or two strong ideas.

Also, you may have noticed that I’m stalling because while the kids were reasonably well entertained by this one, I…wasn’t crazy about it. Here’s the thing, it’s hosted by Boris Karloff, who appears in the longest story (doubtless the one that wasn’t quite long enough to be a feature and so required the tacking on of two other stories). But it’s subtitled, which means it’s first dubbed in Italian. Which means instead of Karloff’s incomparable lisp, you get some cheesy Italian dude with a voice an octave too high. In addition, because it’s Italian, virtually nobody is speaking Italian. It’s meant to have an international appeal, so there are people speaking French and English, and the dubs are distractingly bad. I get the pretensions of being “not afraid of subtitles” (Laemmle’s motto), but this was a film meant to be dubbed. (On the other hand, “The Telephone” in the American version is severely hacked because it was too saucy for 1963.)

There are three stories (the Italian title is “The Three Faces of Fear”):

The first is the story of a woman being terrorized by phone calls, which is basically a vehicle to show gorgeous gals in various states of undress and as lovers. It’s pretty by-the-numbers, and the music is too modern to be scary. The girls are quite good-looking, of course. The Flower’s comment was “I thought it was just Sophia Loren but she’s just the one we know about!” That’s true. And they probably put a few butts in seats in 1963.

The second is the longest story, “The Wurdalak”, about a family terrorized by their patriarch, because they don’t know if he’s alive or a vampire. It’s reminiscent of A Serious Man‘s “Dybbuk” opener, overlong and kind of obvious in most of its aspects. It is very well shot and atmospheric, and that and the music create a nice, spooky atmosphere!

The third story (and the first in the American cut) is called “A Drop of Water” and we agreed (and from what I can tell, most people agree) this is the strongest story. It’s tight, it’s spooky, it’s almost as by-the-numbers as the other two, but each moment and effect is used to build tension. Basically, a nurse steals a ring from a dead old noblewoman/spinster. The old woman is frozen in a rictus grin that works despite (because of?) its simplicity. It has an ironic echo at the end that is subtle enough to be convincing but not feel tired.

You’re gonna feel all 90 minutes of this one, even if you love it. Even so, it’s regarded as one of the better horror anthologies. A fun bit of lore for this movie is that the band Black Sabbath took their name (because they were going by “Earth” at the time and there was another band named “Earth”!) from this film because people were going to see this movie (and not their band). I don’t know if I believe that a band in 1968 named themselves after a five-year-old horror flick, but who knows?