BHFF: A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio

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There seem to be a few standards that will play every Horror Film Festival worth its weight in ripped off fingernails and butcher's aprons -- there's something for the Gore-hounds, there's something for the Goths, there's something for the Gays. (And if you're a gay goth gore-hound you're the luckiest person in the world... at least for one week of the year. Forget all those other awful weeks - this is your time to shine!) Well I think it's time to add to that list the Anthology film, which is inherently something for everybody thanks to that anthology structure -- our minds and selves have seemingly become so fractured and unfocused in this here brand new modern century it only makes sense that our movies would follow suit.

Anthology films have been around forever of course, but it does seem as if there's been an explosion of them with regards to the Horror Genre over the past few years -- they say that making a cheap nasty grimy Horror Film was a good way to kick one's way into the business; well making a short of note is even cheaper, and there are so many people trying to kick their way in these days that the Horror Anthology Film seems a natural fit.

A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio, which played the Brooklyn Horror Fest yesterday, feels even more stripped bald right down to those bare intentions -- the shorts that make up the meat of this thing existed before this film, and were then gathered up by the Argentinian film-makers Nicolas and Luciano Onetti, who built an anthology around them. The structure sees a radio host, kind of a Stevie Wayne by way of Wayne's World, telling his own scary stories on the air, and accepting stories from call-ins, which then become the individual segments. (The radio host bits are by far the worst bits, as the actor playing the host is board stiff.)

Some of the segments are extremely short, and some are just normal short -- none of them feel especially meaty; there's nothing as memorable as any single segment of Creepshow, for instance. But there are good gags, good jump-scares and some real memorable ghouls on display -- per usual some are just better than others. It's really sort of impossible to review an anthology film unless you go piece by piece but you're never gonna get that take from me; just know I have seen worse anthology films in the past few years than this one, which does gift us with a couple of the real wallops you're looking for.