Trapped Ashes is an anthology film telling four stories plus a wraparound tale so it shouldn't be a surprise to hear that it is very much a hit-and-miss affair. Unfortunately, it is more miss than hit overall.
The framing story directed by Joe Dante ("Gremlins") involves the tour of a movie studio by an odd tour guide (Henry Gibson) with the main attraction being a haunted house set featured in a set of films called "Hysteria." The guests and tour guide soon find themselves trapped in the house. According to the tour guide, their only way out is to tell their most horrifying stories, leading into four subsequent short films of sorts. This section works pretty well, mixing humor with good performances and an eerie musical score.
Since each one of the stories play like mini-films, it is best to review each separately.
The first involves an aspiring actress (Rachel Veltri) who is struggling to get chosen for parts so she decides to have breast augmentation surgery. For some reason, she decides to let a creepy doctor use a new procedure in which he implants flesh from cadavers instead of silicone. Before long, she realizes that her breasts are now intent on eating whoever and whatever they can. As directed by Ken Russell ("Altered States"), this segment attempts to mix pitch-black humor with horror but really doesn't do either very well. Aside from a game performance by Veltri, it flails about with no real direction until a truly bizarre and rather stupid conclusion. The film "Teeth" did a similar idea much better.
The next story surrounds a couple's trip to Japan. While on a scenic walk, they come across a man who has hanged himself. The wife (Lara Harris) soon begins to have violently erotic dreams about the man and is then kidnapped, seemingly by the man's restless spirit. The husband (Scott Lowell) consults monks to find out what has happened to her. They inform him that she apparently has been taken to a form of Hell, and he must risk his life to get her back. As directed by Sean S. Cunningham ("Friday the 13th"), this is easily the worst segment of the bunch. The supernatural elements are poorly explained, the horror never convincing because of lame special effects, the animated interludes out of place, and the acting less than stellar.
The third tale is about a screenwriter (John Saxon) who is friends with a famed film director he just refers to as "Stanley." They enjoy talking about anything and everything, often while playing chess. Then one day, Stanley just disappears, leaving his friend and new girlfriend (Amelia Cooke) high and dry. The screenwriter then begins a torrid affair with his friend's girlfriend, all the while feeling guilty about it. If only he knew the whole truth behind his friend's disappearance and, more importantly, his girlfriend. As directed by Monte Hellman ("The Terror"), this segment stands in stark contrast to the others. Highly evocative of earlier Hollywood, it resists the sex and violence that mark the other segments, instead going for something a little classier and restrained. That said, it still really doesn't engage. The pace is especially slow and one wonders for much of the time what it is doing in a film like this as it really isn't a horror film for 99% of the time. Only an out-of-left-field twist at the end qualifies it as a horror film and the twist doesn't work, partly because we were given no hint of it earlier.
The final story concerns a woman named Nathalie (Michèle-Barbara Pelletier), who was born with a "twin." It seems that her mother had ingested a tapeworm while pregnant and decided to let it live inside her because killing it would have killed her baby as well. Much oddness ensues as the tapeworm goes on a murderous rampage. Yeah, I said it was odd. As directed by John Gaeta (the special effects wizard behind "The Matrix" trilogy and "Speed Racer"), this segment is only interesting because one wonders for much of the time how the baby will turn out with the tapeworm inside the mother. Once she is born, the tapeworm doesn't make an immediate appearance but we know it is inevitable. Only through anticipation does this segment hold one's interest. Too bad the payoff is always a big letdown. I can't be the only one who finds it quite odd to see such poor special effects in a film directed by a man known for special effects.
Trapped Ashes offers interest only because of the relative rarity of the anthology format in cinema. The actual product of the format though is made up of lackluster segments drowned in stupid plot mechanics and misguided effects work.
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