The horror anthology franchise is a very strange beast. In English language cinema, there are really only two of note: The Creepshow trilogy (which was followed by a web series and a Shudder streaming series – and that is really just a gussied-up web series, if you think about it) and the V/H/S films*. At this point, V/H/S […]
A review requested by Mandy, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! 1991’s Night on Earth is a crucial pivot point in the offbeat and peculiar career of the offbeat […]
Netflix may be emblematic of the accelerating death of culture and the transformation of motion pictures from one of modern society’s dominant art forms into an endless churn of impersonal “content”, but every now and then they use their powers for good. To wit: the new three-part anthology film The House, in which four terrific […]
I am curious if future cinephiles will ever come around to think of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy as anything other than “Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s other film from 2021”. Winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Fesitval certainly isn’t a little deal, but it doesn’t seem to have done too very much to […]
The French Dispatch isn’t the “best” Wes Anderson movie, and it’s maybe not even the “most” Wes Anderson movie. But I do think it might well be the most “fuck you” Wes Anderson movie, the one where you are either going to follow modern American cinema’s fussiest and most aesthetically controlling director where he is […]
V/H/S/94 is the fourth entry in the inexplicably sprawling franchise that was spawned following the release of the first V/H/S horror anthology in 2012. The conceit of these films is that a wraparound story involves the finding of some footage, always a series of tapes, all containing horror stories filmed by handheld cameras. Like all anthologies, […]
It’s not literally the case that every single anthology film that has ever been made has one segment that threatens to seriously undo all the good work done by the rest of them, but it feels that way sometime. And There Is No Evil, the Golden Bear winner at the 2020 Berlinale, makes things extra […]
It is with a distinct tinge of melancholy that I welcome From Beyond the Grave to the pages of Alternate Ending. For with this 1974 release, we arrive at the seventh and final “portmanteau” film released by Amicus Productions, the little British horror studio that was, in ’74, just about to abandon the genre (the […]
Lord knows if “sequel” is right word to describe The Vault of Horror, a 1973 anthology film based on horror stories published in the first half of the 1950s by EC Comics. Not, as it happens, stories published in the pages of The Vault of Horror, one of the company’s three dedicated horror titles. Of […]
Asylum might have the single best hook of any anthology film I have seen. The story opens with Dr. Martin (Robert Powell), a young psychiatrist, arriving at a remote insane asylum for a job interview. The man who runs the place, Dr. Rutherford (Parick McGee), seems like a bit of an asshole, the kind of […]
These days, when the 1967 Stimulantia comes up – something it is powerfully unlikely to ever do – it’s almost certainly in the context of being the one anthology film that Ingmar Bergman contributed a segment to, right in the heart of his international heyday in the 1960s (it nestles in his career during the […]
It is a truth that I think to be self-evident that 1972’s Tales from the Crypt is the best-known and most widely-seen of Amicus Productions’s seven horror anthology films – maybe even their best-known and most widely-seen film, period. How much of this has to do with the fact that it shares a title and […]
