No, this isn’t any kind of a sequel to the 1970s classic Kolchak, The Night Stalker. It is, instead, a sequel to 2019’s A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio. Surely you remember that-?
Ah well. Look, it’s a horror anthology which centres on the idea of a spoooky late-night show wherein people call in to tell tales of real-life horror and, wouldn’t you know it, the host herself gets embroiled in her own experience of horror.
The individual segments within the picture were not custom-made for it and are, instead, round-the-world horror shorts that are, presumably, intended to act as calling-cards for their directors.
“Playtime” kicks us off, and fails to really set the mood or act as an effective wraparound. Next up is “Foxes”, the best of the bunch, in which a lovely English girl dreams that she’s not a girl at all, but a wild beast, a fox. And she may just be right. “Playback” basically repeats a particularly well-executed bit of business from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, to lesser effect. In this iteration, it’s allegedly the victim himself telling the story of how he got stabbed to death in a corridor. Needless to say, when someone tells you a story that ends with their own death, it tends to seem unlikely. Continuing on the theme of remakes of stories that were done better elsewhere, “Insane” is more-or-less Session 9, except with a metafictional twist in which the film’s subject is unhappy with having her story exploited for cheap scares. And well she might. “Liz Drives” is almost good, apparently running a twist on the old campfire story about the evil hitchhiker, except that it is so difficult to work out who the real bad guy is that you might find yourself just giving up on the narrative long before it ends. Finally, in “Chateau Sauvignon”, we get a pretty compelling tale of cannibal wine in Canada.
And that’s your lot. There’s nothing here that’s really bad, and nothing here that’s really outstanding. It’s a film that’ll see you through some forgettable Friday night, if you’re a fan of the horror anthology format. For what it’s worth, it’s not quite as good as A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio.
★★☆☆☆