An anthology of independent shorts is usually a bunch of awful amateur movies with one or two decent stories if you are lucky. This is unfortunate but many filmmakers start out with the short film format and thankfully many of them end with it was well. Don't get me wrong, there are some decent short films out there but the ratio of bad to good tends to be fairly high. Enigma Films and Creature-Corner.com have done you a favour by sifting through the world of short films and coming up with a collection of five that have some originality and style and a bit more substance than the average gorefest or poorly written vampire or zombie tale.

The first short is entitled "In My Skin" and was intriguing and a good introduction to the collection. After opening with a shot of a bald man wearing a beak while crouched on a desk, I was thinking it was going to just try and be weird but we we given a clever premise of death being pissed off with a murderer for taking someone before their time and exacting his revenge. There was no action and this was a one man show with the bald guy setting the scene for the murderer's punishment. I thought he did a convincing job of carrying the story and aside from a bit of trippy editing, this was an interesting short. It won't change your life but may incite a bit of a conversation. I still don't know what was with the beak though.

Next up we have a film called "Monster" which has a subtitle that states it is 'a modern re-telling of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. This could be said to be somewhat accurate as we have a tortured monster that is reanimated from the dead but we are never shown what it's creator's intentions are or why he wants to bring back the dead. It is also not explained why the creator chooses his own bad actor brother to be the lucky guy. The film opens with a prison break where a mohawked dude named Clay and his buddy Meat blow away a few guards and go on the lam. They soon hook up with another deadbeat who gives them drugs and then they proceed to kill him, cut off his ear, kill the bad actor guy so he can become the monster, kill a pizza guy, drink, swear, and throw chips at a girl. It all comes to a head in a sleazy looking room where all the characters and the monster meet and more violence ensues. Production wise this was pretty good with some inventive shots, decent gore, and even a few stunts thrown in. The filmmakers also chose to use some classical music instead of the relentless nu-metal/industrial that plagues so many indie horror films (although I found "Carmina Burana" to be a little cheesy). Decent, but again this isn't going to change your life and the shell of this story has been used numerous times.

The third film is entitled "Bad Company" and finally we get a little bit of suspense. So many horror movies lately are forgetting about this key component that is vital to make the genre work properly. Another terrible twosome are introduced in the tale after a depressing tracking shot of the aftermath of a bank robbery. Our pair of bad guys do away with their other partner and then hitch a ride with an accountant-looking guy and embark on their path to freedom. Things take a strange turn when night falls and the guys awake to find the car stopped in the vicinity of a graveyard and the driver has mysteriously disappeared. This flick is from Australia and it has some great scenery during the driving scenes. This one also had a tense tone pushing it along but I had some major problems with it in that there were too many unanswered questions and it ended just when it seemed to be getting started. I keep asking myself what the point of the film was as there is not really a beginning or an end.

"The Wretched" is next and is the sole entry from Europe as it is from the Netherlands. Sadly, this one had the power to put me to sleep. Of the four films so far, this was by far the most professional looking with the crew having obvious knowledge of how to use their equipment and make things look great on a low budget. I liked the way that color was used to denote time frame and some of the shots were very well executed but the main problem with this one was that is was boring. Even though it was only ten minutes, it felt like I was watching one dude in one room for an hour. I know they were trying to be artistic but when I am watching something called The Nightmare Collection and the host is named Necro Nancy, I do not want to see art. There are some obvious comparisons to Saw and this was all I was really interested in. Also, ending with a CG shot is a sure fire way to piss off this old-school critic.

The final film in the collection is entitled "Don't Worry, It's Only Your Imagination" and was an awesome low budget ghost story. Clocking in at about an hour this is much longer that the rest of the films but it well worth watching as it has some scary moments, puppet effects, disgusting corpses, and had me looking behind my back as I was sitting at my computer later in the night. The premise involves a guy named Todd who I believe cleans up murder scenes for a living and has to clean up a house with a bunch of rotten food lying around among other things. It turns out that the recently deceased was a bit of a nutjob who has developed a drug that results in the user being able to see all the things that lurk in the shadows that we think we see out of the corner of our eye. Todd gets some of the drug on his skin and as the night wears on he begins to see that the crazy man was maybe not so crazy after all. The black and white cinematography as well as the great score adds mucho atmosphere and Nathan Mobley convincingly carries the film as the young man who slowly goes mad. This was written and directed by make-up effects artist Bill 'Splat' Johnson who did the effects on Eight Legged Freaks and the Sleepaway Camp sequels among other things.

Overall, this collection was pretty good but the last film put it on another level. It is interesting that this is being marketed as an anthology when the final film takes up almost half the running time. I'm not complaining though as I would realistically probably not have even noticed the film if it was a standalone but it being released this way makes it an worthwhile collection that I would recommend for fans of the genre. It is all tied together with a hostess named Necro Nancy (Krista Grotte from Filthy) introducing the films and providing some mild comic relief between shorts. This was a simple way to tie it together and although she is not the best hostess, I wouldn't mind seeing her again hosting a volume 2. Nothing has been announced at this point but I wish some more people would do stuff like this.

For more info you can go to www.nightmarecollection.com. (Josh Pasnak, 10/27/05)

Directed By: Christopher Alan Broadstone, Garrett White, Aaron Cartwright, Martijn Smits, William Johnson.
Written By: Christopher Alan Broadstone, Duke White, Aaron Cartwright, Martijn Smits, William Johnson.

Starring: Krista Grotte, Nathan Mobley, Tony Simmons, Martin Laud.