"Chillers" (1987)

• Directed & Written by: Daniel Boyd
• Starring: Jesse Emery, Marjorie Fitzsimmons, Laurie Pennington, Jim Wolfe, and David Row

(Note: Sorry this one is so short. It's brevity is for reasons that will become readily apparent if you read the review. Or if you go see the movie, which I highly advise against as it may make you want to stab yourself repeatedly with a dull fork. I'll have a review up of "Toy Story 3" sometime soon, a proper review!)

      As I mentioned in my “Meat Market 2” review, investing in a shitty horror movie can be risky. There's a very thin line between “so bad it's fucking awesome” and “so bad that it makes you want to pour bleach into your eyeballs”, and most of the time the film you get ends up being the latter. “Chillers”, a horror film released by Troma, is one of the worst of these B-horror films I've seen in a very long time.
     “Chillers” is an anthology horror film with five stories, similar to other, more high-profile anthology films such as “Tales from the Crypt” and “Black Sabbath”. The wraparound story is that of a group of travelers who are waiting for a bus and while inside of the bus station, waiting, they decide to each share a scary story based on nightmares that they all had recently. The stories are incredibly generic, and feature horror staples such as crazy serial killers, evil demons, vampires, and ghosts. And, like every cheapo anthology film, there is a twist at the end (which, if you don't guess within the first 30 seconds, doesn't say a whole lot of good things about you).
     Some low-budget films use their budget effectively, bypassing the small amounts of money the filmmakers have with interesting techniques or a great script/acting, etc. Other low-budget films don't try with their budget at all, and end up looking like they really are: cheap. Then there are films like "Chillers", which look so cheap that it's almost impossible to believe that there was any money involved at all! Everything in the film looks fake and fragile, the sets all feel like cheap high-school props. There isn't even any gory makeup effects to tide gorehounds over. The only real production value is some spooky lighting, and even then it still looks trashy and stagey.
     But looking for production value in films like this is a lost venture from the very beginning isn't it? Well, if you were hoping for some kind of insane or completely ridiculous/funny storylines that you can laugh at, well too bad! You don't even get that. The film is about 85 minutes, so each story only gets about 15 minutes of screen time, so the stories start way too fast and end way too early, full of slapdash, confusing writing, and reliance on retarded deus ex machina or really lame jump scares so that we can quickly end the story and move on to another. But they're not retarded in a way that makes them endearing or funny, it just feels rushed. The plots themselves are painfully simple, as I said above.
     For example, the last story is about a female student who gets possessed by a (made-up) Aztec demon named Ixpe. She kills a few dudes and then the Anthropology teacher that was teaching in her class tries to stop the demon, but the cops shoot the student before he can exorcize the demon humanely. That's about it, and it's what I consider to be the best story of the bunch. But, if that sounds like enough of a plot to play around with, think again. As I said, the film's short run time keeps any of the stories from really developing, or at least going crazy and trying to be fun. So, you get five 15-minute stories, all of which feature incredibly generic storylines and never really develop into anything crazy and fun. On top of all that, there isn't any elaborate deaths or gore effects to entertain yourself with.
     All of this adds up to make an incredibly slow-moving, boring horror film that feels incredibly cheap and  generic, and ultimately ends up being a waste of time. If you're a sadomasochistic freak that loves to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel of film, then maybe, MAYBE you'll enjoy this. I found it an exercise just to sit through it, and it's a testament to how bad the film is that I can't even think of anything stupid about it to make fun of. It's just an all-around bad movie. Stay far, far, far, far, far, far, far away.



(2nd Note: The trailer for this film is interesting because it is highly misleading. The line "[They] must fight for their lives when demons hidden beneath their psyches suddenly come alive to haunt" is an outright lie. The characters in the film do very little "fighting for their lives", the whole film is simply them telling stories in a bus station, but the trailer makes it look like these demons from their imaginations are attacking them or something, like a really shitty Freddy Krueger movie. Just another reason not to see this piece of shit. It's deceptive!)