Dark Whispers: Volume 1

And people here give it half the points, I pay attention. First thing I noticed was "Featured Review" (you can bet that I always read what FR says. Especially when the rating is 9/10 or 10.) First thing I noticed the reviewer got some in the wrong order. I "can see" the person was "paying attention". Sorry to say, I did not like this movie although I'm all for poppets that can cry like pinocchio (played him in fourth grade). (By the way the person missed the interesting thing about a "mermaid".) Still a fan of this site, not at all the other. Been watching horror movies for 70 years. And yes, I give 10 when it's a really innovative and intersting movie.

There are some great chapters in this dark, occasionally funny horror anthology including one with Anthony LaPaglia and Ed Speleers, a stop-motion animation and one about a man who has caught a mermaid (maybe...). Lovely to see so many short genre tales from talented female creatives.

This is a low budget independent film, with its obvious constraints that come from that, which should be taken into consideration before watching it. However, if you pass that, you will find that its heart is in the right place. I really enjoyed it, because it presented something novel, different visions of the many fears and troubles that women face daily. There were tragic and funny stories, and all the spectrum in between, different ways to narrate the varied experiences of women told through women's perspective. There are subtleties and sensitivities that might appear "boring" to some (I suspect men), but if you enjoy these type of style, you will love it.

*My favourite was the last one and the one that involved plants.

I hope there will be a volume 2, so we can see more of the work of female directors.

Like most anthology movies, it's a bunch of God awful shorts rammed together in hopes someone will watch this rubbish.

The stories are as entertaining as they are scary. Most of them don't even have a finish. It's mostly all artsy fartsy indie crap too.

Whoever was in charge of the sound on this film should never work again. Way too much bass in the voices and music and it makes the horrid experience of wasting your time watching this trash even more unbearable.

There's nothing artistic here, there's nothing scary, nothing entertaining, nothing memorable. Don't bother with it.

Not sure what's going on with the extreme negativity here (well actually it's pretty obvious if you read between the lines, or some cases, just read the lines themselves). This is a decent bunch of indie shorts with a good wraparound story that works as well as it has to in holding the segments together.

From the get-go it's clear this is not something like Creepshow, which was made with one holistic vision, or even like the VHS anthologies, which were intended to run together. Most of the segments in this anthology seem to have been made at different times, with different aims, and as such they generally all have a different voice, a different style. So it's less an anthology and more like a presentation of short films that can loosely be lumped together as dark fiction with a twist.

As that, it's very successful at showcasing these disparate film makers, who all show promise in one way or another. They're all names to keep an eye on, for sure.

If you expect this to be polished Hollywood stuff you're looking in the wrong place. This is pretty raw, but it's full of honest, authentic, creatively told stories. Nothing more, nothing less.

Personal highlights: the twists of The Man who Caught a Mermaid, the atmosphere of Storytime, the concepts of Grillz, the tone of Little Sharehouse of Horrors, and the overall vision and uniqueness of White Song.

People need to stop calling things "bad" just because it's not what they want it to be.