When
it comes to horror movie radio personalities, Rod Wilson cannot compete with
Adrienne Barbeau in The Fog, but who
can? The important thing is he connects with his listeners and he can tell a
spooky yarn with the best of them (maybe not John Houseman in The Fog, but he is still pretty good).
In fact, his framing sequences are the best part of the Onetti Brothers’
anthology film, A Night of Horror:
Nightmare Radio, which had its North American premiere at this year’s
Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
Wilson
produces his own overnight show, so it is just him and a cup of coffee in his
converted ranch house studio. Ordinarily, that suits him fine, but tonight he
gets a little spooked by a series of crank calls. Obviously, the best way to
settle his nerves will be telling his audience the scariest tales he can spin.
However, there is very little consistency to his stories, both in terms of
theme and quality.
Instead
of commissioning new segments, the Onettis just parked pre-existing short films
within their anthology framework, so it is not impossible horror fans could
have seen some of these before. It starts with one of the more aesthetically
challenging, Jason Bognacki’s In the
Dark, Dark Woods, which is even less conventional than his head-spinning
doppelganger feature, The Mark of the Witch. Arguably, Joshua Long’s Post
Mortem Mary is the most traditional, but he wrings plenty of creepiness out
of the macabre premise involving a young girl working as a post-mortem
photography assistant in frontier Australia.
Probably
the best shorts, A.J. Briones’ The
Smiling Man and Oliver Park’s Vicious
would be tricky for Wilson to actually relate over the air, because they
are largely dependent on freaky things seen out of the corner of our eyes or in
reflections. Regardless, they are easily the tensest, most effective
constituent films in the anthology.
On
the other hand, Matthew Richards’ The
Disappearance of Willie Bingham is easily the most polemical, but it is
still well worth seeing for Gregory J. Fryer’s performance as a world-weary
civil servant presiding over the systematic amputations of a convicted sex
criminal-murderer. Of course, something has to be the worst, which in this case
would probably be A Little Off the Top,
a hairdresser horror story with a grisly ending that you’ve probably already
guessed.
Night of Horror:
Nightmare Radio needs
a tighter title as well as tighter quality control. As an anthology, it is just
all over the place. However, James Wright impresses tremendously as Wilson. It
is easy to envision him becoming a genre stalwart based on his work here. Like
a mixed bag full of mixed bags, Night produces
highly mixed reactions, but the good parts are very good. Probably worth
waiting for Shudder or Netflix, Night of
Horror screened during the 2019 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
