Trapped Ashes

All I can say is THANK GOD FOR NETFLIX!!! I'm the type of cinephile who will buy a movie sight unseen if the filmmakers interest me or if it's a horror film that sounds interesting. In that sense "Trapped Ashes" fulfilled the criteria perfectly....

I realized recently though that I really am wasting money buying movies unseen so I signed up with Netflix figuring that I could rent new releases that appealed to me & if I liked em' I would purchase em'. "Trapped Ashes" was a movie I was dying to see. How could it go wrong?? Russell, Cunninngham, Dante, Hellman & Gaeta (The rookie of the 5) each directing a segment of a horror film?? It's gotta rock...Doesn't it?? It doesn't rock. It's actually pretty much a complete failure. It plays like one of those softcore "Horror" movies that used to play on Showtime in the late 80's thru the mid 90's. Aside from some so-so effects in the first segment there is nothing to recommend this disaster at all.

I returned it to Netflix on the same day I received it, Thankful for the money I saved by not purchasing it. Be warned...It sucks!!

I give this 3 stars mostly because of the acting. I truly did think the acting was great in this movie. Making people forget those Vincent Price anthologies or Tales from the Crypt shows, is not going to happen. These stories were written by a horny drunkard or so it seems. They were absolutely ridiculous. No imagination went into this. This was basically one of those stupid late cable sex programs with a tinge of Freddy Krueger infused. I did manage to sit thru the whole thing , hoping for at least one good story. The best part of this movie was the interaction of the 'trapped' , before and in between the horror stories. Way too goth for me, but if thats your thing you may like this film. Articulate acting - Yes, good movie- No!

The actress Phoebe Kane (Rachel Veltri) and her boyfriend Andy (Jayce Bartok), the architect Henry (Scott Lowell) and his wife Julia (Lara Harris), the former director Leo (John Saxon) and Nathalie (Michèle- Barbara Pelletier) receive an invitation for a VIP Tour in the Ultra Studios. When they see the spooky house where the missing director Desmond Hacker filmed "Hysteria", they ask their tour guide (Henry Gibson) to stop the car to visit the infamous house. In a moment, they find that they are trapped in a room without any exit and the guide suggests them to tell the scariest experience of each one like in "Hysteria". Each one tells a spooky tale until they finally discover the end of their stories.

"Trapped Ashes" follows the structure of "Creepshow" with a lead story and four segments in the format of "Tales from the Crypt". The lead segment is directed by Joe Dante and the motive why the participants disclose their stories is silly and unreasonable. Ken Russell directs the funny and bizarre "The Girl with the Golden Breasts" with the artificial breasts implanted by the actress sucking human blood. Sean S. Cunningham directs "Jibaku" with the journey to hell of Julia in Japan. Monte Hellman directs the erotic "Stanley's Girlfriend" and with sexy Nina performed by the gorgeous unknown Amelia Cooke affecting the relationship of two best friends. John Gaeta directs the gruesome segment "My Twin, The Worm". In the end, "Trapped Ashes" is a good entertainment despite the unfair reviews in IMDb. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Armadilha do Terror" ("Trap of Terror")

Note: On 17 January 2012, I saw this film again.

On 21 August 2015, I saw this film again.

This film is terrible.As someone who once starts watching a film finishes it no matter what i have to say every minute seemed like an hour. The directors cannot be blamed each directing the best best they could considering.Neither can budget be blamed as it can with so so many bad horror films.What lets this film down is the truly bad writing.The acting is varied the guy from the burbs doing best the guy from the series the Dollhiouse the worst,once again again poor dialogue is to blame considering how good he was in Dollhouse.The best segment was Saxons which if shown as a Tales from the crypt episode would be considered poor.I now some people have rated this ten,my advice to them is watch more horror films like The Omen 1976,The Exorcist and The Sentinel. The Hammer and Amicus anthology films cannot be considered classics but usually had at least 2 good stories,and even the others were watchable.

I don't know why but I used to be a huge fan of Creepshow and Tales from the crypt although the later series were rather lame. "Trapped Ashes" is very much in this tradition and features 4 horror shorts bound together in a surrounding plot of 2 couples and 2 solo people going on a sightseeing on a Hollywood movie site and getting stuck in an hold horror house with an old guy who leads them around. Turns out they can only leave if each tells their most frightening personal story... so here we go... Story 1 is about an actress who doesn't get any new jobs and decides to get a boob job. Now after her life turns around for the positive she soon realizes that her breast are vampire boobies feeding on human blood which doesn't go to well for her lovers. This story is pretty bizarre and trashy and captures the spirit of old "Tales from the crypt" stories best. Its totally idiotic but the end is so over the top its fun. Story 2 is a ghost-story about a couple moving to Japan where the woman is seduced by a monk who dies and takes her to hell where she turns into a succubus. Her husband soon learns he has to free her from there by feeding her a spell. The story is OK, but as frightening or thrilling as a Sesamestreet Episode. At least you get some naked shots and some nice animation sequences of old Japanese paintings which work pretty well. Story 3 is pretty much nothing leading nowhere. An actor and his best friend a scriptwriter regularly meet for chess until a girl appears. Soon the scriptwriter disappears and the actor begins a love affair to find out years later that the girl is some kind of ghost/witch/vampire... honestly I couldn't care less because the episode is boring and makes no sense. Story 4 is another strange one about a girl who grows up in her mothers womb along with a tapeworm and lives with a strange desire for collecting food for her "twin". When she is treated badly by her stepmother the "twin" takes revenge.

What most of the stories suffer from is incredibly long passages of introducing of characters and that is way stretched and often even unnecessary for the plod. So when the action starts most of the time is up and there is not too much time for the horror to happen. Like most of those story collections there is some bad apples in there and I couldn't recommend this average movie just for the vampire boobies and the finale. This is just for real die hard fans of horror shorts... the slow ghost movies won't be too interesting for neither "Tales..." Fans nor others because they don't lead nowhere. Too bad...