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The 1969 Czech anthology film Prague Nights consists of a trio of tales of lust, revenge, and feminine wiles, each infused with a singular combination of the macabre, the grotesque, and the comically sensual in depicting some of the darkest and most mysterious aspects of Czech culture. Between the intriguing visual techniques (including color filters and stop-motion animation), genre mashups, and musical scores that range from Gregorian chants to Nino Rota-esque orchestral pieces, the segments readily whip up dense, moody atmospheres that are as playfully provocative as they are eerily doom-laden.

The film opens with a framing story in which a foreign businessman (Miloš Kopecký) is looking for a good time and follows a coquettish blonde (Milena Dvorská) into a remote cemetery where she regales him with three supernatural, fantastical stories. Where the pair are gallivanting about contemporary Prague, each successive segment is set further in the past and draws on...

Though the Czech New Wave of the sixties was not as addicted to anthology films as the Italians (any major Italian director could have called a film Eight and a Half, since they all directed episodes at one time or another), they did make Pearls of the Night (1966), which showcased nearly all the major graduates of the national film school, Famu (a.k.a. the Kids from Famu): Vera Chytilová, Jaromil Jires, Jirí Menzel, Jan Nemec and Evald Schorm.Three years later, Schorm was back, collaborating with new chums Jirí Brdecka and Milos Makovec on a raunchy supernatural triptych, Prague Nights. An international traveller picks up a strange woman, determined to enjoy a night of illicit passion during his Czech stopover. Driven through a green-tinted sepia night in her vintage limo, he's told three tales of murder, lust and the supernatural, and, at the end, as in any Amicus...