The Horror Network: Vol. 1 (UK DVD)
Gareth Jones
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Starring Nick Frangione, Artem Mishin, Jan Cornet, Brian Dorton, Javier Botet, Macarena Gómez
Directed by Brian Dorton, Joseph Graham, Manuel Marin, Lee Matthews
Distributed by Left Films
Anthology flick The Horror Network: Vol. 1 eschews the traditional wraparound thread and jumps straight into the action with Lee Matthews’ 3AM. Here, a lone woman finds herself terrorised in the dead of night by a supernatural entity within her home.
Starting off well, 3AM pushes all the right buttons for atmosphere but very quickly becomes obnoxious in its sound design. Far from frightening or skin-crawling, the various rings, bangs, jack-in-the-box tunes and The Grudge-like rasping are amped up to irritating levels within the audio mix. Given that story is light and this short lives and dies on ambience, it completely scuppers itself with this barely tolerable aural onslaught, as it heads toward a final shot that would be creepy if it weren’t so predictably staged and lacking in punch.
Next up, Joseph Graham’s Edward involves a conversation between a tormented young man and his psychiatrist, Aleksey. Edward starts off well, with a suitably grim vibe and a couple of earnest head-to-head performances from its two main leads. It very quickly runs out of steam, though, eventually limping its way to an ending which – whilst impressively bleak – is a bit of a struggle to get to.
Keeping up the bleak tone, Lee Matthews is back behind the camera again for The Quiet, which sees a young deaf girl stalked through a rural forest by an unknown assailant after getting off her school bus. More than any other tale in The Horror Network: Vol. 1’s lineup, this one feels like a classic horror short of the Tales from the Crypt or Hammer House of Horrors ilk.
Owing to this, the ending isn’t particularly difficult for the devout horror fan to see coming… but The Quiet is nonetheless capably directed, edited and performed, even if it fails to capitalise on the deafness aspect it obviously wishes to hold front and centre.
The standout entry, Manuel Marin’s Merry Little Christmas, is up next. Staggeringly brutal, this tale of domestic abuse and the lasting effects it has across multiple generations is one nasty, savage piece of work that remains as equally hard to watch as it is to look away from. Sadly, despite some utterly fantastic prosthetic creature effects and a truly disturbing vibe, the narrative side is disjointed and lacking in focus – and when all is said and done it disappoints through failure to effectively tie the proceedings with its setup in a satisfactory manner.
Finally, Brian Dorton’s amateur hour The Deviant One is an odious, black-and-white series of scenes (devoid of recorded dialogue) that follow an unnamed murderer as he kills, rapes, mutilates and disposes of a young man in between title cards of bible verses. It’s uninteresting, nowhere near as subversive as it likes to think it is… and quite frankly not worth the time invested.
Left Films brings The Horror Network: Vol. 1 to UK DVD sporting the trailer and an extended version of its worst short – The Deviant One – which is actually worse than the edit that shows up in the main feature. Demonstrating some poorly acted, horribly stilted dialogue and sequences that are dragged even further beyond the limits of patience than seen previously, this is an even more awful version of an awful short.
With no consistent theming or wraparound, The Horror Network: Vol. 1 lacks cohesion as a whole — something which certainly isn’t helped by the overall sub-par quality of its entries. Just skip this one.
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Special Features
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