The Horror Vault 3 is an anthology of five horror stories: “A Christmas Haunting,” “Zombie Office,” “Undone,” “Unchangeable,” and “The Psychomanteum.” Since I knew I’d be watching it alone, I chose a sunny Saturday afternoon, surrounded by my bodyguards (dog and four cats). I hadn’t considered that the afternoon I chose was the dreaded Saturday the 14th. Nevertheless, I swore to remember my mantra, “It’s only a movie, It’s only a movie.”
Well, it’s true. The Horror Vault 3 is only a movie. A very, very bad movie. Friends, you know I love bad movies, but The Horror Vault 3 is a different kind of bad. Oh…it does have some inferior sound recording and terrible acting, I’ll give it that. And the camera work doesn’t quite make it to the level of average. We know those are good things in bad movies, but The Horror Vault 3 is one of those culty violence-for-the-sake-of-violence movies in which bad things happen. (If you didn’t notice, that was a period at the end of the sentence, as in “…movies in which bad things happen PERIOD).
Imagine watching Psycho or Memento up until the final fifteen minutes, and then the movie ends. That is the Horror Vault 3 experience, except that it’s not well made. The stories have no resolution; some are not even stories, but set-ups for stories that never happen. If this sounds vague or confusing, it’s because I’m trying to avoid plot-spoilers (I was let off with a warning the last time I revealed too much).
Try this: imagine (again) that I make a movie called The Horrible Things that Happened at Bob & FCE’s House.” The camera draws you into an idyllic little love nest where you see Bob and FCE sitting at the table. Bob asks FCE what he would like for breakfast. There’s a knock at the door. A person in a Good Humor Man costume enters (it’s important that he’s wearing all white). He or she goes into the kitchen, rummages through a drawer while being totally ignored by Bob and FCE, then pulls out a meat cleaver and hacks them to pieces. The end.
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