The Theater Bizarre

 A young woman visits the seemingly abandoned Guignol theater, only to be greeted by an MC (Udo Kier!) who introduces, mime-like, five stories with varying (but tending to high) levels of depravity and bloodshed.

 The original Grand Guignol theatre in France specialized in plays featuring graphic displays of gore and sex, to the point where the words today are used to describe over-the-top, sadistic violence and splatter (sex, not so much). Most of the stories in this anthology film certainly do try their best to live up to that- or down, depending on your taste. Well, with one exception, but we'll get to that.

 The wraparound segment with the woman at the theater and Udo Kier is directed by Jeremy Kasten. It does have a premise of sorts, but really it's just a cheesy way to introduce the different stories. It's fine for what it is, though personally I find the would-be-creepy human puppets look like shit.

 First up is the folk horror/Lovecraft mashup of 'The Mother of Toads', an adaptation of a (good) Clark Ashton Smith story, tied closer to the wider Cthulhu mythos by avowed Lovecraft fan Richard Stanley.

 It's pretty fucking terrible.

 Two American tourists (Victoria Maurette and Shane Woodward) fall under the spell of a witch (the legendary Catriona McColl, with porn star Lisa Belle subbing in for some... key scenes) while touring France. She lures the man promising access to a copy of the original Necronomicon, only to seduce him after poisoning him with mulled wine. There are loads of cute toads, a Creature from the Black Lagoon with two sets of tits and a cool corpse puppet, but just about everything in this short is atrocious - from the acting (at least McColl seems to be having fun) to a complete lack of tension or anything interesting going on. They completely mangle the original story, and do without its amazing ending (which, to be fair, would have been hell to shoot, especially with this budget).

 At least the scenery is nice (Connecticut passes for the fictional province of Averoigne). Other than that, this is a complete waste of twenty minutes.

 Things get better, thankfully, with Buddy Giovinazzo's 'I Love You'. It's a Berlin-set tale of a disintegrating marriage (between André Hennicke and Suzan Anbeh) that ends with a simple, but effective twist, followed by a bleakly humorous capper. The acting is much, much better, as is pretty much everything else.

 Then comes Tom Savini's turn; The man's built a bit of a secondary career directing horror shorts. It's a fun, lurid Tales from the Crypt-style shocker depicting a Sandman-esque scenario of nested nightmares ... about genital mutilation. That's fine, since we get plenty of chances to root for the protagonist's (James Gill) wiener getting chopped off - the guy is a massive piece of shit. Debbie Rochon plays his no-longer suffering wife, and Savini hams it up as a sleazy psychologist. Features a plate of severed penis and mash, plus a 'Lovecraftian vagina' (their words, not mine).

 'The Accident', by Douglas Buck, is a complete outlier: an entirely tasteful reverie built around a frank conversation about death between a mother (Lenna Kleine) and her very young child (Mélodie Simard) after they witness a gruesome accident.

 It's not a particularly deep conversation, but it is heartfelt and real in a way films, particularly genre films, struggle to get right.

 The music is great and the filmmaking is on-point, with some staggeringly beautiful roadside scenery and a dying deer so realistic I stuck around the credits to make sure the 'no animals were harmed in the filming of this picture' disclaimer popped up (it does). The acting is as naturalistic as the script. A gorgeous little short, its power magnified several times over for being nestled between all this cheerfully depraved material.

 And then we're back to the muck with Karim Hussain's 'Vision Stains', although it's quickly apparent some of the previous story's lyricism rubbed has off. Unfortunately, its lyricism is of the florid, pretentious sort, as a woman (Kaniehtiio Horn) provides constant narration as she gruesomely harvests the memories off the junkies she murders. If you're not a fan of the part of the Venn diagram where eyes and needles intersect, you might want to sit this one out.

 The problem is that the narration's prose is infuriatingly overwritten, delivered in a dead-voiced monotone. Things are shook up when an extremely unlikely development leads to the woman getting a sort of metaphysical comeuppance. Maybe the script didn't buy into its own writerly bullshit after all.
 This one was a bit of a chore to get through, but it's well made, has some indelible imagery, and it's beautifully shot - Hussain's an established cinematographer with some impressive credits over the last decade or so. In light of its twist, I'd say it's a keeper.

 Finally it's the turn of David Gregory, a prolific director of genre documentaries and featurettes. 'Sweets' is a garish, borderline surrealist story about the breakup between two food fetishists (Lindsay Goranson  and Guilford Adams) and its inevitable conclusion.

 In an anthology centered around the grotesque and the bizarre, this one holds the honour of making me look away. It's not the gore that did me in, though (though there's some fun gore in this one) - it's all the feeding and vomiting. Turns out I'm definitely not a food fetishist, folks.

 Even if it weren't for that, I didn't like this one. Its frequent gross-out moments, shitty art-school satire and over-the-top sleazy aesthetic are calculated to repel and... guess what? It repelled me.

 The whole film mostly suffers from a flat, digital look (with The Accident and Vision Stains as the honourable exceptions) and the sound mix is often off, with overblown music often threatening to swallow everything else in the mix. The gore effects at least are top-notch.

 The Theater Bizarre certainly delivers on its title, and on the gleeful descent into debauchery and bloody mayhem promised by its invocation of the Grand Guignol spirit - with The Accident both anchoring it and unexpectedly elevating it; Even with two complete misses, and overlong at almost two hours, I'd say it's a worthwhile collection.