Dr. Shock’s Tales of Terror (2003)

March 24, 2004

by Nathan Shumate

Written, produced and directed by Douglas G. Agosti and Lance Otto Smith
Starring
- Mark Standriff
- Timide
- Otto Smith
- Douglas Agosti
- Bruce Hoyt

The tagline on the DVD cover is, “Some tales are better left untold…”

And some punchlines are just too, too easy.

This is an anthology of short films made by After Shock Productions over the course of the last several years, held together by the hosting segments of one Dr. Shock, a late-nite TV-style horror host who may be the most annoying character I’ve seen on screen yet this year. Of course, I never really saw the appeal of the sorta-jokey-except-not-really-funny horror host phenomenon, so maybe I’m not the best judge of quality here. Let’s just say that Count Floyd probably isn’t watching his back.

The hair is fake… the glasses are fake… but the nose? It’s real.

The segments themselves break the standard mold for such products in this way: Instead of three stories, there are four! Really, that’s the most startling innovation; otherwise, they’re standard little horror vignettes, produced on consumer-grade video by devoted gore fans who are too busy having fun to craft an entertaining movie.

The first segment is “Bullet for a Vampire,” and if I tell you it’s a vampire-vs.-the-Mob story, you’ll pretty much have the whole thing. there’s this crime boss, see, named Lucciani (Mark Standriff), who likes to eat Italian food and watch home movies of the guys he’s whacked. He has an ultra-bitchy daughter, Sophia (Chris-May Zeithami), who decides to go to an old gypsy fortune-teller. The gypsy says… Something. I’m not sure. Her fake accent’s so thick, I couldn’t discern one word in five. It’s something about a dangerous mystery man, I think. Anyway, Sophia doesn’t like what the gypsy tells her (or maybe she was just upset that she couldn’t understand it either), and has some of her dad’s goons rough the old woman up.

So the old gypsy visits a crypt at the graveyard and calls up an old skeleton to rise and do her bidding…

“You’ll fit in fine around here, Drake, as soon as you learn to dress decently.”

Next day, Sophia’s out spending obscene amounts of her father’s cash at a jewelry story, and gets mugged by two toughs on the way home. (It wasn’t until long after the scene was over that I realized that the bizarrely washed-out color for this scene was meant to indicate day-for-night shooting). She’s rescued by a mysterious man in black (Timide) who kills both muggers and walks her home. And this mystery man’s name?

“Drake Ula.”

If I had any high hopes for this movie, this is where I surrendered them.

Drake meets Dad, gets a job in the family business (under the stipulation that he only work at night, due to an “allergy to the sun”), then shows up in Sophia’s room in full vampiric opera dress and bites her. Before Luciani knows it, he has to contend with a whole houseful of vampires.

I suppose there’s a good movie to be made of the “vampire vs. the Mob” idea. This isn’t it. Between lackluster production values, limitations on the scope of the story dictated by budget, and some bad creative decisions (“Drake Ula,” for crying out loud), it ends up being more a place holder than a story.

“Hey, what’s a ‘food handler’s permit,’ anyway?”

The next segment, “The Town That Loved Pizza,” is the only one of the four that shows anything resembling wit — by which I mean that it’s no less ridiculous than the other three, but it doesn’t act as if it doesn’t know it’s ridiculous. (Go ahead, parse that grammar. I’ll wait.) Two halfwit redneck brothers, Obadiah (Bruce Hoyt) and Jebediah (Mark Newman), decide to open a pizzeria in the abandoned restaurant at the edge of a small Texas town (awfully snowy for Texas, owing to the fact that it was shot in Ohio and all). Their gimmick? Nothing but all-meat pizzas. I certainly hope I don’t have to draw you a map.

The sheriff (Otto Smith) gets suspicious of them right off, mainly because they’re opening a pizza parlor in a town with a population of 200. (Better not raise too much dust, sheriff, or people will begin to wonder why they need a full-time law enforcement officer in a town that size, too.) He also starts to notice that locals begin to disappear, and since there aren’t ANY other suspicious characters, he puts two and two together…

Again, not a terribly creative or innovative story. Sheriff tracks down the brothers and puts paid to them, the end. The only things really going for it are the horrifically grungy kitchen in which the brothers make their vittles, and the fact that everyone’s a redneck. Rednecks are always good for a bare minimum of amusement. So if you’re putting together a collection of every single “homage” to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, here’s the reason to put this one on your shopping list.

Almost as much fun as watching grass grow.

The third story, “The Garden Tool Murders,” at least wins a Truth in Titling Award. There are murders, and they’re done with garden tools. There’s a fastidious groundskeeper (Otto Smith), see, and these people who litter, pollute, or trespass on his grounds keep dying in unsavory ways — but is it the groundskeeper doing the killings? Or is it someone else? Given that there are exactly two characters who aren’t dead within 30 seconds of their screen debut, the groundskeeper and his nagging boss (Douglas Agosti), the pool of suspects is mighty shallow; it either has to be one of the dead obvious characters, or there has to be a new character introduced in the last minute. They used Plan B here.

If you came looking for gore, you’ll probably like this one the best, as it features executions like the litterer buried to his neck in the turf who then meets a lawnmower. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for things like interesting storytelling, you probably aren’t even watching anymore by this point.

The final story (oh, that’s right, there are four — and here I was all ready for it to be over) is “Demon’s Day,” and it’s a complete mess. I can describe for you some of the stuff that happens, but I honestly can’t tell you the story. First up, a woman running down an alley is attacked by a demonic thingie in a black robe and has her heart ripped out. Then the coroner finds tissue under her fingernails and gets the bright idea of cloning Satan just for the fun of it. He ends up with a wiggly rubber baby that he has to keep shaking to pretend that it’s alive (not the worst fake plastic baby I’ve ever seen, but close). And after that…

Is it just me, or has Satan been packing away a few too many donuts?

Well, now there are two demon creatures. They look different, I guess, but since they both wear dark cowls and are shown mostly in jumpcuts and backlit silhouettes, it’s hard to follow which is doing what, but in essence they run around killing vulnerable people (a pimp, a dreaming Satanist, a repentant hooker). Then the two demons meet in a circle of fire, exchange insults, and fight until one kills the other with flashpaper explosions. Then… the dreaming Satanist wakes again, just in time for a demon to come crashing through his door.

Huh? No, I don’t know either. If there ever was a workable plot behind this one, it never made it to the final cut.

So. Four stories, or rather, four bits of film with plenty of running around but precious little plot. There’s lovingly-rendered gore, sure, but it’s not clever enough to make up for the dull acting, the unsatisfying stories, and the murky visual qualities.

Does it live up to its tagline? You betcha.