Morbid Stories – review

Directors: Various

Release date: 2019

Contains spoilers

A portmanteau film, the wraparound follows Candy (Courtney Akbar), estranged after splitting from her partner and feeling a little creeped out in her house.

As she feeds the dogs and speaks to her mother on the phone strange things start to happen (such as the gas cutting out for the stove) and her cell-service dying. When she gets in her car the radio suggests there has been an attack on the States and, as she drives to try and find out what has happened, the reports become more and more outlandish – eventually mentioning attacks by vampires and zombies. The stories take place in the preceding 24 hours and two of them are vampire stories.

Tim O'Hearn the long haired stranger

The first story is one of these and starts with a man (Tyree Cobbins) stumbling down the road, his hand to his bleeding neck. A car, which has an inverted cross hanging from the rear-view mirror, seems to bear down on him. Elsewhere Jamie (Shane Smith) and Helen (Crystal Loverro) are woken by a knocking at the door. Eventually he goes to answer it – with a baseball bat in hand, just in case. Helen watches through a security monitor with orders to ring the police at the first sign of trouble.

too late

At the door a long-haired man ( Tim O'Hearn, Dry Bones) asks whether he can come in and use the phone. One of his companions holds the injured man and he weaves a tale about having crashed and having no-cell reception. He is insistent about being invited in but Helen notices something strange… they do not appear to be in the security camera’s feed. She tells Jamie to close the door but too late…

Helen fights back

The injured man sprouts fangs and attacks Jamie. Helen has to face four vampires on her own… To be honest, I was a little non-plussed by this entry, not so much in the actions of the vampires (that could have made a serviceable short, albeit with a simplistic narrative). It was actually the dialogue the vampires used that seemed to indicate a wider plot but led nowhere and left the short feeling unsatisfactory. That said I rather liked the lead vampire offering a free (and pointless) shot with a stake – an attack that failed because of the assumption that he had a heart.

meat

The other short is the final story and that was probably the best of the film. It begins with Morgan (Krystal Pixie Adams, Joe Vampire) with a plate of meat, but the meet does little good. She goes to the kitchen and gets a needle (with what looks like a syringe of blood) and injects herself. She gets a message from Jake (Eight The Chosen One), who is coming round and, as the injection does not seemed to have helped, she desperately goes out looking for…

the zombie

It won’t be surprising if I tell you it is for someone to snack on. She sees a guy on his phone but he is soon in his car and driving off and so she attacks a guy shuffling along. She bites his neck, from behind, but he grabs her arm, pulls it to his mouth and bites. As he turns, we see the injury to his face. Of course, he is a zombie. She runs home and the bite on her arm is already black and weeping and, just after she changes jumper, Jake has arrived.

zompire

The dialogue tells us that she has avoided him for two weeks and, given that he also brings her a favourite sandwich on garlic bread, the implication is that she is fairly newly turned and has been avoiding him because of it. However the zombie infection spreads quickly through her, causing her flesh to rot and her behaviour to become feral… she becomes a zompire and he is in the house with her…

portmanteau vampire

Just to mention that the wraparound features a vampire also and so there is a lot of vampire action in this portmanteau but, despite nice photography for an indie (which was consistent across the films), I wasn’t massively impressed with the stories. The last one worked because it was simple, had a point and a nice gore level. The others were perhaps more narrative lacking and the way they fit into the over-arch was unclear (as was the actuality of what was happening). That said it was serviceable enough and I am only scoring the vampire sections 5 out of 10 reflects that the zompire tale was worthwhile, whilst the home invasion tale was frustratingly wider-narrative light and the dialogue teased but meant little.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK