This is a collection of three films, all student films I think, each with their own opening and closing credits. The title Terrifying Tales has been added to the beginning, and there are no end credits for the whole.
The first segment starts off pretty well. It's night, and a young woman kisses a younger boy who is sleeping, possibly her brother. She looks at a photo of a man in uniform. She sneaks away as a bug exterminator's van pulls up, and then the next morning as she enters a roadside diner she sees the van again. She enlists the help of a man playing pool to get away from the van her father is driving. He puts on his jacket that has a NASA patch on it, and they speed off in his station wagon. He remains completely silent, and he drives recklessly fast. In summarizing, I'll jump to the end. Given that he has a NASA patch, and the title is "10 Seconds to Countdown," it will come as no surprise that they wind up in a spaceship. More surprising that there is a dying, crying primate of some kind in there. I confess I have no idea what was going on in the ending scene or what to make of the ending. This segment was copyright 1986.
In the second segment "Final Destination: Unknown," a woman picks up a male hitchhiker, who strangles her. He accepts a ride from a man, and is invited to his house for chili. The man puts some men's headshot photos into a file near his computer. He calls his daughter down for chili, and we think: oh no, maybe no one will come to dinner, for could the hitchhiker have killed his daughter? Well - yes and no, because his daughter does come down for dinner. The ending is pretty predictable. This one wasn't too bad. Copyright 1989.
In the last segment, two men show up at what is evidently a crime scene. They pick up a bloody knife in an alley and seem to put it back down. They enter a room and look around, and wake up a woman there. One of the men leaves, the other stays and wants to help the hooker he woke up. She had witnessed the murder, or the murdered person was or roommate, or perhaps there was no murder at all. The man who stays, the coroner, even stays the night, and a perhaps retarded man, possibly one-armed man, named Charlie enters talking about potatoes. The coroner thinks Charlie did the murder, and meanwhile by staying with the hooker, the coroner's wife is getting upset. Charlie is possibly AWOL, though what the military would be doing with him in its ranks, I can't imagine. I don't think the murder (if there was one?) is solved at the end, but there is an autopsy to do. Can't say I understood this one either. Copyright 1986, though it looked much older to me.
