marymorrissey The idea of a breast implant surgery gone horrifically wrong is cute, but the overly campy treatment thereof doesn't really make the best of it. all in all, this was the strongest idea of the lot. Next comes the Japanese horror "nod" - a real snooze. why does she have to have umpteen versions of her necro-fantasias before disappearing? Likewise the husband's running around asking people if they'd seen her would have worked better if he'd asked half as many people before getting to the person with some sort of answer. The one about the two gifted directors might have been called, "how I became a horrifying cliché", "we both loved jazz, we both came to LA to make movies..." eek! and some of the dialog in that one oh my: She, "What's the most important rule in chess?" He, "Follow your gut. And enjoy the emotions." She - looking as though she wouldn't know a contradiction in terms from a loose stool, "That sounds like a contradiction in terms!" He, "Well, perhaps it is!" As horrifying as this exchange looks on paper, it's a lot worse when these lines take a good 2-3 minutes for the ham bone actors to finally divulge. And, eek!, a "love scene" follows. A slow as mo-lasses love scene: it takes a good 5 minutes to get to the first lip lock; there is so much posing that has to come first. eek! eek!There is a sure logic, it would seem, from proceeding from a brilliant film career to running a vineyard! I actually kind of liked the...idea of the ending. Problem here was that strangely, after the glacial pace of the film up till this point, the denouement is rushed, to its detriment. Whatever points were to be made in the 5 individual "postscripts" are barely outlined. Some of this urgency to get on with it would have been way better spent a-hustling' earlier on.

jt1999 Why would a smart and creative guy like Dennis Bartok come up with an embarrassing, insipid, boring, unfunny and revolting piece of pseudo-porn like "Trapped Ashes"?If this is his tribute to "Tales From the Crypt," "Creepshow" and "The Vault of Horror," Bartok has seriously lost his way... and Freddie Francis is probably rolling over in his grave about now. Maybe Bartok should have made that story instead: clueless wannabe screenwriter desecrates legacy of legendary British director of "Tales From the Crypt," causing famed director to rise from dead and turn idiot writer-producer into Hamburger Helper.So why did Bartok do it? Maybe he thought by rounding up a few veteran directors, his picture was in the bag -- no matter how awful the writing was. Or maybe he had an unconscious desire to destroy his chances of ever making it in this business. Hard to say. His therapist is probably the only one who knows for sureBut one thing's for sure: Bartok can kiss his Hollywood career goodbye!

dbborroughs Tales from the Crypt like anthology of a group of people on a studio tour who get trapped in a "psycho" like house and tell ghost stories to escape. Of interest mainly for the directors involved-Joe Dante, Ken Russel, Sean Cunningham, Monte Hellman the film itself is a mixed bag. One story has to do with an actress getting her breasts done, another has to do with a Stanley Kubrick like director and an actor friend, Another has to do with a couple who go to Japan and discover a hanged man and the last has to do with a young woman and her twin..or something. Three of the four stories aren't bad, if over long. One (the girl and her twin) is just fair. The problem is the films don't really add up to much, more so that the sting in each tale is left for the very end of the film where we are told what really happened. Its a weird way to do it, and it almost works, but not quite since any tension from the stories are long gone by the final revelations (There is also a couple of lapses of internal logic as a result of the breaking apart.) Worth a look on a slow Saturday on cable. I do have to say that the Ken Russell "Girl with the Golden Breasts" tale is very amusing and a vast improvement over his direct to video home movies. I especially loved his cameo.

dschmeding I don't know why but I used to be a huge fan of Creepshow and Tales from the crypt although the later series were rather lame. "Trapped Ashes" is very much in this tradition and features 4 horror shorts bound together in a surrounding plot of 2 couples and 2 solo people going on a sightseeing on a Hollywood movie site and getting stuck in an hold horror house with an old guy who leads them around. Turns out they can only leave if each tells their most frightening personal story... so here we go... Story 1 is about an actress who doesn't get any new jobs and decides to get a boob job. Now after her life turns around for the positive she soon realizes that her breast are vampire boobies feeding on human blood which doesn't go to well for her lovers. This story is pretty bizarre and trashy and captures the spirit of old "Tales from the crypt" stories best. Its totally idiotic but the end is so over the top its fun. Story 2 is a ghost-story about a couple moving to Japan where the woman is seduced by a monk who dies and takes her to hell where she turns into a succubus. Her husband soon learns he has to free her from there by feeding her a spell. The story is OK, but as frightening or thrilling as a Sesamestreet Episode. At least you get some naked shots and some nice animation sequences of old Japanese paintings which work pretty well. Story 3 is pretty much nothing leading nowhere. An actor and his best friend a scriptwriter regularly meet for chess until a girl appears. Soon the scriptwriter disappears and the actor begins a love affair to find out years later that the girl is some kind of ghost/witch/vampire... honestly I couldn't care less because the episode is boring and makes no sense. Story 4 is another strange one about a girl who grows up in her mothers womb along with a tapeworm and lives with a strange desire for collecting food for her "twin". When she is treated badly by her stepmother the "twin" takes revenge.What most of the stories suffer from is incredibly long passages of introducing of characters and that is way stretched and often even unnecessary for the plod. So when the action starts most of the time is up and there is not too much time for the horror to happen. Like most of those story collections there is some bad apples in there and I couldn't recommend this average movie just for the vampire boobies and the finale. This is just for real die hard fans of horror shorts... the slow ghost movies won't be too interesting for neither "Tales..." Fans nor others because they don't lead nowhere. Too bad...