Directed by: James Eaves, Pat Higgins, Alan Ronald
Starring: Eleanor James, Tina Barnes, Sam Dacombe
God, this movie has “theater major” written all over it. It’s three short horror films by different directors that all vaguely revolve around a bordello and it really covers the gamut of cheap horror movie cliches. Plenty of boobs, red-dyed corn syrup and “badass” goth girls for all the people who are really into those sorts of things.
Yep, three movies in an anthology. The first is “The Ripper”, a delightfully misogynistic tale of a guy who kills prostitutes (very original) and calls himself the ripper, but it turns out that the latest girl he gets is actually some sort of shapeshifting demon who protects prostitutes and kills him in response, and also she’s the REAL “ripper”. So I guess… Jack the Ripper was this girl? I don’t know. The second one is “Stitchgirl”, which is so Tim Burtony that they had to make it black & white to add to the Burtonyness of it all. Some overeloquent old sailor comes in to the bordello and asks for the perfect girl, so the madam goes and cuts up a bunch of other girls to make a Frankenstein’s monster-type girl for him, whom he immediately falls in love with, despite the fact she does nothing but stand still and look forward gape-jawed. The last one is “Vice Day”, which is so boring you forget it’s supposed to be a horror film until the last couple seconds. It’s about a guy skyping with a girl who takes off her clothes, and they talk about pretentious boring shit.
I’m trying to figure out which of these three was the best, but they’re all pretty insufferable for one reason or another. I guess the first one didn’t have as much dialogue that the writer clearly thought was super fucking clever, but ended up sounding like an 8th grader trying to ape Hemingway. There was that whole misogyny thing though, and it was actually quite a bit worse than even the normal horror movie fare. I mean, usually they try to explain why the bad guy cuts up women with something like “he was abused by a woman” or “it’s an incredibly thinly veiled metaphor for being horny”, but this guy tortures girls and tells them that the human race would be better off without women in general, or something like that. Basically what I’m saying is that all three stories are very juvenile and mildly titillating at best; it’s a very easy movie to miss no matter what it is about horror movies you enjoy.
Films in Boxes 
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