Lore, an Anthology “Hosted” by Richard Brake

A truly memorable anthology needs a good host. It is impossible to overstate what Rod Serling and the Crypt Keeper brought to The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt. For this film, Richard Brake is quite inhospitable, but in the right way. It would be a really bad idea to go camping with him, but people do it anyway in James Bushe & Patrick Ryder’s Lore (with an installment from Greig Johnson), which releases today on the Icon Film Channel in the UK.

At the start of the wrap-around segments, “The Campfire” written by Patrick Ryder & Christine Barber-Ryder and directed by Ryder & James Bushe, four not especially bright friends meet-up for Darwin’s immersive horror outing. Everything about that screams “bad idea,” right? There they are regardless, so on the first night, he challenges them to throw a totem in the fire and tell a story that is not merely scary, but profoundly disturbing to them.

The cocky guy starts with “Shadows” written and directed by Bushe. Frankly, it is strange that this yarn, in which gangsters chase a two-bit hood into an empty warehouse, only to find a possibly greater monster inside, would make such impression on the teller. This is the weakest constituent tale, but the execution is still tautly effective.

“The Hidden Woman” written by Ryder & Barber-Ryder, but solely helmed by Ryder is also somewhat familiar in terms of themes and premise, but it is very creepy. A single mother and her young son have inherited a house that is almost certainly haunted. The apparition in question has a strong attachment to an antique phonograph, which is nifty horror prop.

The ringer in the bunch, “Cross Your Heart” comes from screenwriter-director Greig Johnson, but he is probably the most successful evoking ironic Tales from the Crypt vibes (both in the spirit of the comic, but particularly the TV series). Poor long-suffering and sometimes abused Cath has reluctantly agreed to humor her cad husband Steve, by participating in a swinger-swap. However, he is too horny and drug-addled to see the seductive Donna has some much nastier (and largely deserved) in store for him.

Katie Sheridan, Rufus Hound, and Alana Wallace are all terrific in the three featured roles. It is all mordantly funny, but then later disturbing to think you of the potential implication of what viewers most likely cheered on.

The Last Stop in Yuma County, on BluRay

If you grew up in the 1970s, you might remember a time when gas stations ran out of gas. With all the talk about reviving various price controls, we might just bring those bad old days back. For one “last chance” gas station, that reality is already here. Their re-supply track is running late, unnerving several dodgy characters who need to get out of town fast in Francis Galluppi’s The Last Stop in Yuma County, which releases today on BluRay.

This is a thriller in the tradition of The Petrified Forest, but the characters probably feel like they are stuck in Sartre play. Vernon’s filling station is out of gas, so his potential customers must wait for the truck to arrive in Charlotte’s diner, where the air-conditioning is on the fritz. The nebbish traveling salesman hawking knock-off Ginsu knives recognizes Travis and Beau match the description of wanted bank-robbers, which is no coincidence.

Essentially, the two fugitives hold them hostage, but they all try to act normal for all the other customers coming into the diner, including Deputy Gavin. Charlotte tries to send a warning through him to the Sheriff, her husband Charlie, but poor Gavin is an exceedingly dim bulb.

Yuma County is a reasonably successful desert noir, mainly due to its colorful characters and the experienced ensemble of genre-friendly thesps portraying them. On the other hand, the execution and pacing are somewhat uneven. After fifty-some-minutes of ever-so deliberately slow-building, Galluppi seems to say the heck with it and unleashes total bedlam.

Regardless, Richard Brake is appropriately sinister as Beau, the brains of the two-armed robber-operation. Sometimes, Jim Cummings takes over-the-top a bit too far, but he finds the right level of twitchiness for the knife salesman. The great Barbara Crampton also gets a lot of laughs in her slightly larger-than-cameo appearances as the Sheriff’s receptionist, Virginia.

Buozyte & Samper’s Vesper

This titular teenaged girl is a budding Dr. Frankenstein of botany. She has a talent for splicing together partially sentient plant-things. Apparently, that is a good thing, because her post-apocalyptic world is not dangerous enough already. Unfortunately, the world-building is solely concerned with visuals and has no regard for logic in Kristina Buozyte & Bruno Samper’s Vesper, which opens this Friday in New York.

In the dystopian future, people no longer act out of logical motives or incentives. They just behave the way screenwriters need them to. The elites in the mega-city “citadels” are going to be evil and Vesper, the plucky bio-engineering teen caring for her paralyzed father Darius, will be impossibly noble. He lost his mobility while serving in the Citadel’s army, so they fitted him out with a hovering drone to serve as his real-world avatar—and then cut him loose.

Father and daughter live in the no man’s land surrounding the Citadel. They even spurned the grubby survivalist community led by Vesper’s gangster-like uncle Jonas, but they are still forced to trade with him for the bacteria that powers her father’s life-support system. Vesper hopes deliverance might finally be at-hand when she gives shelter to a Citadel resident who crashed in the wasteland. She hopes her talents for bio-engineering will earn her a place in the mega-city, with a referral from Camelia. However, it quickly becomes clear the mysterious woman is in fact not the potentially helpful power-broker she made herself out to be.

Vesper is an amazing looking film, but the social systems it posits are simplistic at best. Why would the Citadel create these revolutionary potent seeds and then just keep them locked up, awaiting a dissident to steal them? What exactly is their end game? Being mean is not a sufficient answer. Yet, Buozyte and Samper clearly expect critics will reflexively accept and praise their crude class warfare, which has indeed been the case so far.

In a way, those awesome visuals are a bit of a tease, because we only see those striking behemoths featured on the poster from a distance and therefore are never allowed to explore their mysteries. Weirdly, there is also a crazy cult compulsively stacking objects, sort of like the zombies in Cell, but you have to admit lifting from one of the least prestigious Stephen King movies is an unconventionally original proposition.