Freakshow. Sounds a bit like Creepshow. And, surprise, surprise, it's a horror anthology. But it's nowhere near as good as Creepshow. The stories are poorly constructed, the direction is weak, and the acting barely passable. Most of the budget seems to have gone on lingerie and lasers (or, more likely, the budget was too low to hire lasers and the owner loaned them to the movie in exchange for a credit). Perhaps they should have called it Cheapshow.
The film starts with a Twilight Zone-style voiceover from a bargain basement Burgess Meredith soundalike, after which the wraparound story begins: ambitious news anchor Shan (Audrey Landers) walks home after reporting on a movie theatre massacre, stopping to use the telephone at a bizarre museum where the owner proceeds to show her the exhibits, each of which tells a chilling story.
Tale one sees a desperate junkie Fidge (Dean Richards Wiancko) denied his next fix when a poodle runs away with his bag of dope. The second story revolves around a pizza delivery boy who bets his work colleagues that he can successfully deliver an order to a cursed house. Chapter three sees a young woman mistakenly declared dead after a recreational drug leaves her paralysed. And the final story features a pair of entrepreneurial gravediggers who sell cemetery soil to a golf club, upsetting the dead in the process.
As with many a late '80s horror, logic doesn't come into play that much, especially in the second tale, which inexplicably turns into a music video halfway through, with numerous hot women in sexy underwear performing dance moves to a bad rock song. None of the stories have very satisfying conclusions. As anthologies go, this is a pretty poor collection, and as such it is only likely to appeal to avid fans of the subgenre or those who can't get enough of offbeat low budget trash.
