Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear

After watching this a few years back, I didn't think too much of it. I remember liking the last section, Listen, with the music that makes people go crazy. On the strength of that segment, I decided to pick up a Blu-ray on sale.

After rewatching the movie - out of order - I realized it's actually better than I gave it credit for.

There are five segments. There's actually a thread connecting all of them. I checked the other reviews here, and it doesn't seem like any of them noticed this.

The corporation that is centered on in the fourth segment has tentacles in all of the other stories. It also sets up the fifth segment.

All of the stories have something to offer. They aren't especially scary, but at the least, they are interesting. The only one that suffers is the Sight segment, which seems like an interesting idea, but the execution is a bit confusing.

It was a completely unassuming film that had nothing to do with the senses at all, but merely a sign of the author's and director's ailing mind. I do not recommend watching this movie at all

Another year, another horror anthology, and this time it's the turn of 5 SENSES OF FEAR which unsurprisingly contains five short tales each based around one of the human senses. Like SCARY OR DIE or the V/H/S/ movies, this is acceptable stuff for horror fans, although it lacks the quality of something like TRICK 'R TREAT.

The problem with 5 SENSES OF FEAR is not the production values, because they're actually decent for a change; although the stories were shot on the cheap and in a very short space of time, they look good and the calibre of both acting and direction is of an acceptable standard. There are no big names here, but then you don't go looking for them.

The problem is that all of the stories are focused on delivering gore rather than true scares so that the scope ends up being rather limited. The first one, SMELL, is about a guy who comes into possession of a new and experimental perfume; this has a classic outcome and was my favourite of the five stories. The second one, SEE, involves some predictably nasty eye violence and very little else. The third, TOUCH, is about a blind kid who has a car accident and is the most atmospheric of the quintet, although the story is very slight. TASTE is an all-out gore effort set in an office, while LISTEN goes down the found footage route and isn't too shabby. All of the stories are acceptable, but I found them lacking in delivering proper horror themes or scares; is gore all the genre has to offer these days, I wonder?

An anthology series about the five senses all interlocked together.

The Good Story-Touch. Stranded in the forest after a car accident, a blind boy tries to find his way to help only to stumble across a serial killer's secret hideout. Unable to get away, he has to rely on his instincts to get away. While there wasn't a whole lot to really like here, as the ingenuity of the boy having to use his other senses to outwit the madman is negated by the twist ending of requiring him to survive anyway, it really saps the entry of it's potential as the forest setting works nicely and the scenes of him wandering around finding the area is pretty chilling. As well, it doesn't really use it's targeted sense all that well so it has some problems but remains the best of the episodes.

The Bad Stor(ies)-Smell. Unlucky in life, a man receives a mysterious bottle of perfume from a strange woman and soon begins a run of good fortune. However, he soon begins to realize there's dangerous side- effects to the strange accessory. While on the surface this had some potentially intriguing ideas about the destruction of the human body and how those around us will forgo physical attraction over material wealth, the fact that these are downplayed so significantly in favor of a tired rehashing a romance between separated lovers makes this one feel much longer than it really is. In addition, the fact that this one never really plays up the fact that the perfume makes all the difference and it never exploits how it smells to others is a real lost art, meaning this one is really only watchable for the make-up effects on the decomposing body.

Sight-Troubled by his loneliness, an optometrist uses his machines to extract his patient's memories and use them to experience their life. When he inadvertently triggers a homicidal man into a killing spree, he finds himself on the killer's list. Frankly, this could've been something as it really plays on a true fear for once, in that the strange machines at the doctor's office do more than help us, and the stalking in the abandoned office late at night really get quite chilling at times, but this one is just way too short to mean anything. It's got all the ingredients it needs to be creepy and chilling, except length for everything is over far too quickly and it never really uses the sight angle at all as the whole stolen-memories angle is used to experience their lives, not to fix his ailing sight and the process for stealing memories is happened-upon, which could've made this work more than it does. It's the closest to going up, but it stays down here.

Taste-Heading into an office for an interview, a man finds the agency who called him in to be quite unusual and strange. When he rejects their offer, he finds himself stalked through the hallways by the executive who has a strange habit of eating the ungrateful. Quite simply, this was the lamest entry in the series. The main point here is that it has no connection to it's chosen sense, and features a man running away from a woman with a strange contraption on her head that lets her devour human flesh. It doesn't have any time devoted to it and really seems to be there simply to interconnect all the different story lines together since that's how we know they belong together, but it doesn't do anything with them and feels so lame and unrealistic the image of the contraption is wasted by all the negative elements around it.

Hearing-Attempting to fix a documentary, a film crew finds their subject is an insane music composer who crafted a tune that made people commit suicide. Unaware of the dangers of their assignment, they soon realize the deadly powers of the song and try to stop it from spreading. Another one that had potential with a pretty creepy set-up and a rather innovative approach to a clichéd subject, but instead the insistence of this one to appear as a found-footage piece severely diminishes it's impact. The shaking footage and tons of obscure shots really do this one in, and when the horror finally hits home it's in the last few minutes since all they do is argue with each other over how to edit the piece together and then flashes of the song that they're working on. A great concept, horrible execution.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, Brief Nudity and drug use.

The first 4 senses that they covered had really cool concepts. What I liked the most is that they were all interconnected one way or the other. The "hearing" story lacked a lot and it wasn't my favorite. It felt rushed and disjointed but but the actors were pretty good.