New Chilling Tales: The Anthology

The intermittent narration of the awesome Martin Jarvis makes this show just about palatable. (He would have been one of the great Doctor Whos if the BBC knew what the hell it was doing.)

In the 70s and 80s British independent television was the master of making programs like this. Thriller, Chiller, and many many more. The golden age of scary telly.

Unfortunately, this effort comes nowhere near that standard.

On the one hand, it was nice to see new versions of these classic horror stories. However, all four are lacking in basic plot development. Poe's story didn't have a spark to it. "The Monkey's Paw" is decent but stilted. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was the biggest disappointment. "The Damned Thing" was slow moving and lacking forward movement. Disappointing.

I found the first tale of this anthology of New Chilling Tales: The Anthology, amusing, because it felt very cheap and poorly scripted, and I appreciate that. The second tale felt like a bit more was spent on it so it was no longer so bad it's funny, it just bored me.

I like classic gothic horror so I was quite excited when I saw which 4 stories were going to be present in this little anthology.

It features the Monkey's Paw, the Telltale Heart, the Yellow Wallpaper and the Damned Thing so the content was primed and ready to be fantastic.

The trouble is it's been released as a movie yet credits roll after each story like it's a compressed mini-series. A minor gripe but a gripe all the same.

The cast are mostly great and deliver, the cinematography is bland and quite flat and the execution is...........mixed.

You see 5/10 is based on an average, the stories ranged from 2 to 8. So though I enjoyed some, other parts bored me to tears.

Standing at just over an hour in length including narration and credits, the story lengths also vary heavily and therefore it's rather imbalanced. The last story for example feels very blink and you'll miss it and the Telltale Heart had absolutely zero time to build up tension.

If you like these classics you may find a level of enjoyment otherwise avoid. At time of writing 2019 is the second worst movie year on my analytics, it needed better than this.

I will however say it's better than the 2.9 IMDB currently has for it.

The Good:

Strong performances

Classic tales

The Bad:

Isn't exactly a movie

Some weak narration

Cinematography is pretty poor

This anthology of short stories is excellent! I'm only familiar with the monkey paw and Tell Tale Heart story. They were all well written with the filmmaker's own vision of these classic stories. The acting was also quite strong!