Thriller Zone

Instantly forgettable trilogy of unrelated horror shorts that you should place near the top of your "must pass" list. The first concerns a zombie arriving to play a few hands at a buddy poker night. It's probably the best of the batch, but still no winner by any stretch of the imagination. The second story is an incoherent mess that has something to do with a convict in the future being shipped through space on a craft patrolled by androids.

The third segment is just scrapings from the Joe Spinell flick "The Last Horror Film", and even though I like that one personally as a feature, the squat version is just a ridiculous waste of time. So, all in all, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to see this amateur collection. Blah.

2.5/10

The third segment of this horror anthology has been edited down from The Last Horror Film (1982) starring Joe Spinell and Caroline Munro. The print used is pretty poor, looking very washed out; having seen an old videotape of that film recently which was not anywhere near as in as bad shape, I can't explain why it looks as bad as it does in Thriller Zone. The story in The Last Horror Film was rather a mess, or appeared so as a result of the editing, so it is not particularly helped by being further edited! Spinell is a disturbed taxi driver who is in love with his favorite horror film actress, played by Munro. He stalks her at the Cannes Film Festival, hoping to have her star in a film he will direct. However, while trying to enlist her, he is also threatening her and all the people around her that "you've made your last horror film."

It's possible that the first two segments have also been edited from feature films, but if so, they were probably unreleased; they're not on the IMDb. The first segment, "The Last Hand" has also been featured in another horror anthology though, one that is currently not on the IMDb (though it is on Amazon's German site, amazon.de ASIN: B00008XGJT), called Stephen King's The Night of the Crow AKA Stephen King's Nightshift Collection (not to be confused with the other titles by that name that are on the IMDb). As far as I know, "The Last Hand" is not based on a King story, however. There are some decent gore effects in this, as the star has strange visions of another man at the poker table who was supposed to be dead, unbeknownst to the other players.

The second segment "The Final Hour" features a very young-looking William Forsthye, despite his beard. He's an "ex-space commander" being transported for an appeal to his murder conviction. He complains about computers thinking they know everything about him, when they're wrong. The pilot receives some instructions from him in a crisis that save the ship, and she thereafter starts some kind of relationship with him. She then finds him trying to hang himself in his cell, and things take a bit of a twist from there, but nothing particularly unexpected.