The Field Guide to Evil

I was very excited to see this at the Brooklyn Horror Film Fest after seeing the directors involved, but most segments were overwhelmingly mediocre. The concept is fantastic and most segments are visually compelling but ultimately fall flat.

The Cobbler's Lot, The Palace of Horrors, and Al Karisi were the strongest and best executed, where Melon Heads was the weakest, being laughable at best. The Cobbler's Lot was definitely the stand-out short, with a beautiful muted palette of unique visuals and dark comedy. Inspired by silent era and 70s psychedelic film, this was a charming ending to a disappointing anthology.

..but it isn't.

While well intentioned the collection missed its target.

We need more folklore in cinema but the tales were undone by some ropey direction, crap make up and some dodgy acting.

The frustrating thing is that some of the stories had some unsettling and disquieting moments, but these were offset by the absurdity of others.

This movie had an excellent concept and an exceptional introduction sequence.

But the stories... just didn't quite make sense.

Only three out of eight made complete sense - the American story, the Indian story and the Greek story.

The American story was laughable, the Indian story was vaguely creepy (probably the best one) and the Greek one was barely horror....

...much like the other stories, which came complete with bad effects, atrocious acting and incoherent storylines.

The concept was brilliant and I was so excited to see the movie... it's just a shame that I got all hyped up in the intro only to be let down by being downright confused throughout.

I have three stars. Two for the good stories (Greece and India) and one for the good concept.

If I were you, I wouldn't waste your time.

It was a cool idea to have a collection of folklore/horror stories from different countries made by and in those countries, but dear god, the execution on the majority of these short films is awful. For about 2/3s of these stories, the plot and acting is so poorly done that they're almost hard to watch. I wouldn't call it a complete waste of time, but don't go into it with any higher expectations than an extremely low-budget student film.

Even though it has an interesting concept of entering other countries' folklore, this movie was badly written and weakly executed, to a point where we can't even understand the storyline of some segments. They completely wasted this movie's potential.