Shock Chamber

A nosy reporter interviews the mother of grown identical quadruplets, after one of them is killed. She tells three tepid tales of murder and mayhem, explaining that her son was "no good" and so were the other three.

In "Symbol of Victory," Ron is a college student infatuated with his father's secretary,. He buys a love elixir from a door-to-door alchemist (!) who looks like Billy Joel. The potion works for about a week, and the price of the next batch goes up a thousand bucks. Just before Linda dies mysteriously, she tells Ron that she and the alchemist schemed to bilk Ron's father out of a lot of money. The tale ends with a series of double crosses.

In the most original of the three stories, "Country Hospitality," Cameron stops for gas at a backwoods fillin' station and is tempted to stick around for a meal with Blanche, waitress at the nearby diner. She poisons him and, with the help of her husband and some guy named Buford, bury the body and ditch the car. But they find $200,000 in the car. Greed and murder follow.

The final tale, "The Injection," is also concerned with purloined money and double crosses. This one covers very familiar ground, as a man fakes his own death so a best friend can collect a hefty life insurance policy.

SHOCK CHAMBER offers a better framing story than I've seen in other anthologies, but the individual episodes cover the same thematic ground and wore me down. Although the first tale is well-acted, the remaining characterizations are soap-opera caliber. Intended as a cerebral horror movie, SHOCK CHAMBER is bloodless in more ways than one.

It was shot on video in a very snowy part of Canada.

Avidly seeking campy/creepy horror anthology goodness it is always cause for celebration to discover a new collection of vintage televised frights! This exquisitely oddball omnibus hails from Canada, fashioned in the middle 80s, 1985 to be exact, going under the moody moniker of 'The Greedy Terror' or 'Shock Chamber', but whatever the title, stolid director, Steve DiMarco's frightfully freaky, creep-loaded compendium has oodles of low budget charm, winningly eccentric performances, and obscurantist weirdness to playfully prop up its amusingly D. I. Y 'TV Movie of the week' hokiness!

The first sordid tale of prolapsed morality is spryly augmented by the dreamy, skyward synths of Peter Dick as we take a heady, mystical trip into the alchemical flimflam of some spectacularly shady misuse of a magic elixir! How wise was it for nice guy Ron (Russell Ferrier) to administer this nefarious love potion to his thus far reluctant beau Linda? (Jacqueline Samuda) and are the motives of this shifty, bearded purveyor of eldritch potions entirely benign? They frequently say that all is fair in love and war, but perhaps this tawdry tale of love lost suggests that it is time to amend the play book, since there's clearly a case for stricter rules of engagement!

Our weary wraparound narrator continues her oratories of familial woe with a rather bizarre turn as Ray-Ban-sporting city slicker Cameron (Doug Stone) soon unwittingly finds himself murkily embroiled in the skeevey, backwoods machinations of two misfit grease monkeys, finally discovering to his chagrin that the price of beautiful Blanche's (Karen Cannata) strong coffee and home-made pecan pie might be a little too rich for his refined metropolitan blood! In this specifically sinister instance, 'Country Hospitality' comes with a killer 'hidden' surcharge! While the theme to this unsubtle yarn might be a tad too whimsical for its own good, it remains an okay foray into the darkly avaricious hearts of a hokey group of far from okay, double-dealing okies.

Saving the very worst for last, Steve DiMarco's 'The Injection' eerily injects a heroic dose of macabre E. C Comics black humour into his increasingly immoral tale of an especially mercenary medico's rapid descent into penurious despond as this criminally hard up for cash quack evilly concocts a truly maleficent misappropriation of pharmaceuticals for an abject 'get rich or die tryin' scheme that favours the latter outcome!

There is an endearing goofiness to these occasionally lukewarm spooky shenanigans which fitfully lends 'Shock Chamber' a welcome boost of B-Movie lunacy, and while the pleasingly lurid narrative's twists and turns aren't exactly of the refined Roald Dahl calibre, it nonetheless delivered enough deliciously dorky B-Movie delirium! While I appreciated Steve DiMarco's modestly macabre Canadian chiller, it must be said that my acutely warped sensibilities have not infrequently given my hyperbolic enthusiasms a somewhat questionable verisimilitude to cinephiles with a FAR lower tolerance for creaky celluloid misshapes such as this!

Not that there aren't atrocious TV-movies anymore, but nowadays nothing so blunt and openly-cardboard would be considered for primetime. One in a long series of ultra low-budget genre flicks from Emmeritus films, this movie is also a rare reminder that local TV stations (in Canada no less) once had the guts and wherewithal to produce their own feature films (or so-called). Apparently this movie also had partial Telefilm funding. It's hard to imagine CHCH making its own dramas these days, let alone features, and Telefilm putting cash forward for a non-union B-movie is a stranger anomaly. Alas, neither funding source put up much (I've heard these were made for around $30k). Given the mainstream-market aims and miniscule budget it's not surprising how this turned out; somewhere between a cheap soap and a bad dream.

The description for this film is about as lazy and misleading as the script; the first story isn't about a teenager (or if it is, it's one who looks 30 and has apparently completed many college degrees, although this assertion isn't supported by his lack of intelligence). Likewise, the second story isn't particularly about the 'waitress' (who actually owns the establishment) so much as an ensemble cast of criminal characters. Speaking of characters, none of them are intriguing or likable in any way, although the best thing in the film is the bizarre bit part of a landlord (Sue Morrison) who dresses (and acts) like a 6-year-old who got into her mother's makeup and probably swallowed a good deal of it. Another highlight is the criminal trickster who thoughtfully prepares a printed-out label ('4- Second Infinite Loop') so we can all understand his unbelievably clever audio-cassette decoy. Perhaps the producers ripped that label from the film's soundtrack source of endless, drab synth music.

I saw this film as 'Greedy Terror' which is a more appropriate title than 'Shock Chamber' seeing as all the characters are greedy and there's no shock and no chamber. In fact, not a single death or any other element of action is really captured on camera. What remains is a lot of suspicious glances and threatening chit chat, some mildly amusing corner-cutting techniques and a pox for anyone who's ever felt nostalgic about Canadian TV in the 80s.

If it weren't so dang conventional, the sheer awkwardness of this film may have invoked something approaching creepy. As is, the only scary thing is how it ever got made.

This shot on video (and boy, do I mean VIDEO - that cheap 80's "super VHS" stuff), this "horror" anthology features three short stories without a decent connecting thread (or wraparound).

Now, I'm a fan of this sort of thing, but c'mon! Each story features the same actors made up differently - and each ending features death by poison - sorry - I mean "potion" (as the writers have so cleverly put it).

The connection between an insurance scam and a magic "potion" is beyond me. The producers may not have been able to afford a separate prop aside from the miniature vile?

Worth checking out if you enjoy crap - and also enjoy seeing characters die in un-gruesome fashion by means of poison.

I don't intend to waste too much time or too many lines on this amateurish piece of crap, but let's just say it's a good thing this movie doesn't even count five miserable votes yet, here on its IMDb-page. The less people know about the existence of this complete turd, the better! Steve DiMarco's big debut is a shot-on-poor-video-quality anthology, scripted down without the slightest bit of imagination and starring some of the most insufferable actors & actresses you'll ever see. All three stories are unspeakably boring and seem to last two hours each! After literally struggling myself through the first one, I was amazed that only 27 minutes had passed. Barely still able to keep my eyes open after the third & final story, the sole thing I discovered was that all the incoherent tales revolved on poisonous liquids. That actually makes it even lamer, since there are no bloody murder sequences or sinister set-pieces. Annoying tale #1 is about an evil love-potion (a premise that got handled much better in a "Tales from the Crypt"-episode starring Muriel Hemingway and David Hemmings), crap tale #2 involves a large scaled crime-conspiracy gone awry and stupid segment #3 has something to do with insurance fraud. But it doesn't matter, as NO ONE should ever watch this terrible, terrible excuse for a motion picture. I assure you have seen grade school plays that were executed more adequately. "Shock Chamber" easily ranks among the five worst movies I ever had the misfortune of seeing. Avoid it like leprosy!