User Reviews

To start off, this movie was filmed on an extremely low budget by a 14-year-old, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect before I watched it. What I got was one of the most entertaining, fun experiences I've seen in a movie for a long time. It follows an obnoxious teenager with a snotty attitude who steals a VHS tape entitled Slaughter Tales. When he brings the tape home, he is warned by an apparition in his bathroom not to view the tape. He ignores the warning and watches the movie anyways which features a handful of horror stories including one about a kid who is possessed, killer slugs, a serial killer who has a shrine devoted to his dead mother, and much more including fake trailers. As the snotty kid continues to watch the movie (and sarcastically complains about it in breaks between the stories which were among my favorite parts), he learns there is more to it than just a simple horror flick...

Although it's not technically as well made and well acted as other anthology horror films like Tales From the Crypt, The House That Dripped Blood, Creepshow, or other similar films, I never really expected it to be. In fact, it was a lot better than I thought it was going to be. As I said before, it was made on a super small budget by a young teenager and his friends/family around the house. You can still see how much passion and enthusiasm Johnny Dickie put into it. He directed the film, shot the film, acted in it, did the special effects, just about everything you can think of. His love for the horror genre and how much he deeply cares about filmmaking really shines through. You can hear from listening to the director's commentary on the DVD that Johnny has an enthusiasm towards making horror films which I feel is also evident in the movie itself. Of course a few of the performances and special effects weren't top notch and you can definitely tell it has a low budget; but there was a lot of love and appreciation put into what was happening on screen so I didn't even care and was able to overlook the flaws.

It also has a funny side in addition to the horror. Some of the lines made me laugh (like in one of the stories where the killer threatens his victim saying "I'm going to rip your f***ing heart out from your eye socket"). It appears that everyone involved had a great time being in the film so it is fun to watch for that reason. it's still just as entertaining as other similar films including the ones I mentioned above and I do think it is worthy of being watched by every horror fan. I can't wait to see what kind of work Johnny Dickie will do in the future.

An obnoxious adolescent (a perfectly annoying portrayal by writer/director Johnny Dickie) steals a mysterious VHS tape of an atrocious horror anthology flick that turns out to be cursed. Said clunker has five tales of terror on it: A dude mutilates himself after drinking a strange liquid, a masked killer stalks two friends, an escaped mental patient commits a series of brutal murders, a filmmaker finds himself trapped in a house infested with deadly demonic slugs, and a bored teen gets possessed by an evil spirit. Dickie pays affectionate homage to lovably shoddy 80's straight-to-video fare: The laughably lousy acting from a lame no-name cast, the meandering story, the deliciously cheesy gore, the droning synthesizer score, the interminable pacing, the cruddy (far from) special effects (you gotta dig the primitive stop-motion animation used for the demonic slugs!), the grimy washed-out cinematography, and a few tacky dream scenes all vividly capture the distinctly dreadful charm of endearingly cheap and amateurish nickel'n'dime shot-on-video dreck from the beloved Greed Decade. Better still, Dickie even tosses in a couple of hilariously awful fake trailers as well. The ubiquitous Lloyd Kaufman has a funny cameo as a nutty old man. A real rubbishy hoot.