"Tales from The Lodge" is a British Horror Comedy that I found on Amazon Prime. Not quite a portmanteau film, as the overarching story is more involved than just a framing mechanism, the film still tells a number of shorter horror tales within the runtime.
Six friends, Married couples Joe (MacKenzie Crook) and Martha (Laura Fraser) and Emma (Sophie Thompson) and Russell (Johnny Vegas) as well as Paul (Dustin Demri-Burns) and his new girlfriend Miki (Kelly Wenham) come to a remote farm house to commemorate the passing of another friend, who drowned there three years early. As the friends get drunk and tell each other ghost stories, the increasingly isolated Miki decides to leave but then returns a few hours later having been attacked in the woods by a stranger.
Generally, the film is more successful as a comedy than it is a horror film. Five of the six stars gets to direct their mini-stories and though there's not a particularly spectacular one amongst them, they all work in the context of the film. I really liked how those stories interacted with the voice overs telling them, with the characters pausing or changing actions depending on how the narrator changed the telling. The best is probably Johnny Vegas' Zombie/Lost Boys one, which includes animation and visual effects - as well as some fourth wall breaking Zombie make up moments.
I don't like spoilers in my reviews, so I'll dance around the details here. I felt the resolution of the overall story let the film down a bit. I did see some of the twists coming and when you look back on it, the stories that the characters tell are often revealing about themselves. This whole final section doesn't quite nail the right tone, getting the mix of comedy and violence a bit wrong.
On the whole it's a bit slight and has a few missteps, but to say this was Writer/Director Abigail Blackmore's first feature, I'd say it shows some promise.
