Writers: Jacob Grim, Sal Hernandez
Director: Jacob Grim
Dreadtime Stories is a low budget, indie portmanteau horror movie.
The frame for this particular set of stories involves a weird book that one of the characters ‘borrows’ from a corpse at a funeral home. He then takes it to a party where several of the attendees each read one of its strange stories. It’s a pretty irrelevant wrapper, and probably the weakest part of the film. Like most portmanteaus what matters are the internal stories. Are they any good?
They’re actually pretty decent. With nine of them I’m not going to detail each one, but they range the gamut of horror themes. There’s also a wide variety of styles, from tongue in cheek to serious. Impressively the script manages to add an interesting and at times surprising twist to the end of many of the tales.
My favourite story is actually one without a twist: the first, “Home Cooking”. This centres around a homely, middle aged couple preparing dinner. With the close up shots of vegetables being enthusiastically chopped you pretty much know where the story is going. However it’s done with great style and wit. The actual events contrast with the happy smiles of the main characters and the gloriously inappropriate music. And interestingly this piece has no dialogue, just background music.
My other favourite was “Punishment”, quite the opposite of Home Cooking. Here we have a story which throws a twist but just as I was thinking “Oh, is that all?” it swerved for a much darker ending.
Not all the stories are as successful. For example “Distension” tries too hard and goes a twist too far. Similarly “Wits End” tries to top an obvious twist but fails to convince.
So there are some superior stories in this collection. Direction is also nice, adjusting to the different moods as appropriate. Production values and acting are generally ok, but variable as you’d expect from a low budget indie.
The problem is length. The individual stories are decently timed, they don’t go on too long. But there are too many of them. There are reasons most anthology movies have around five stories, it works. Nine is just too many – especially as not all are successful and a couple tread very similar ground. 105 minutes is excessive, the film would have been a lot better had the makers culled a couple of their babies and brought it down to 75.
So there’s a lot of potential in Dreadtime Stories and I hope Grim and Hernandez do more in the future. If you don’t mind the roughness of an indie then give it a try, but possibly watch it in two sessions.