Is the new fright anthology, THE HORROR NETWORK, a good Halloween watch? Maybe...

...or maybe not. It depends, I should think, on how old you are and how many other "scary" movies you've managed to view over your years. I am fast coming to the conclusion that I've seen way too many of this genre, and an anthology movie like THE HORROR NETWORK serves mostly to underscore that point. Horror anthologies have a storied history, going at least as far back as the 1945 British gem (in its time; much of it still holds up well today), Dead of Night. Later came some fun Hammer horrors, then the more "modern," special-effects-enhanced efforts like Creepshow and Tales from the Crypt, all of which took fear into a different, less subtle direction, while the most recent examples -- the V/H/S group and the even better ABCs of Death -- tend to count on envelope-pushing sex, violence, transgression and gore to do the job. (And, one must admit, they sometimes do.)

Only one of the short films included in this five part anthology rises to the challenge, and that's the penultimate creep-fest, Merry Little Christmas. Directed by Ignacio Martín and Manuel Marín, with the latter handling the screenwriting duties, this 20-minute film is the longest in the bunch, and also the best, as well as the goriest and biggest-budget effort. Involving masked women and what they get up to (not good), spousal and child abuse, agoraphobia and self-destruction, this is one wild, woolly, yucky piece of filmmaking.

Otherwise, the movie contains four perfectly professional scare films, in which everything will remind you of stuff you've seen previously, and you'll mostly want to ask, Could you please get on with it?" Second best film honors go to Joseph Graham's Edward, shown below, in which a shrink and his patient do an eventually tiresome pas de deux, complete with everything from guck and gore to personality transference.

The film begins with 3 AM, in which a young woman in an empty house in the middle of the night is menaced by...something or someone. Sounds familiar? It is. The Quiet, directed by Lee Matthews, a bullied-because-she's-deaf school-girl go from frying pan into fire, as she becomes predator prey in some highly bucolic, beautifully photographed scenery.

The final tale, in black-and-white, offers us a guy, a dog and a killer, plus Bible verses from Proverbs, Jeremiah, Leviticus, Colossians and Revelation. Seemingly dedicated to exposing the hypocrisy of the anti-gay fringe, it's mostly a yawn -- but at least it's a short one.

That's it.  If all this sounds like a productive way to spend Halloween (or whenever), by all means, take a chance. The Horror Network -- via Wild Eye Releasing and running 87 minutes -- made its DVDebut yesterday, October 27, just in time for that favvorite, would-be holiday.

For Halloween, Richard Schenkman's MISCHIEF NIGHT hits theaters one-night-only, October 30

You'd think, what with Halloween being one of the most popular faux holidays of the year, that some movie studio, major or minor, would make sure it opened a scary movie that week. Not usually. (Sometimes they'll synchronize a particular fright film to open on a Friday, the 13.) This year, however, there is a little slasher number sneaking into town (some 41 of 'em, actually, and all across the country) entitled MISCHIEF NIGHT which takes place on Halloween eve (which is evidently known by that "Mischief Night" name in certain circles -- not mine, but maybe yours).

Directed and with a screenplay by Richard Schenkman (shown at right in what I suspect is a rather old photo, and who years ago gave us a fine little "guy-'n-gal" comedy called The Pompatus of Love), from a story by Jesse Baget and Eric D. Wilkinson, this is a movie that might best be described in the words of my spouse, as we finished watching it: "I've seen worse." So have I. Quite a bit worse, actually. If this sounds like damning with faint praise, I suppose it is. The movie, after all, deals in practically nothing but the clichés of the genre. Yet Mr. Schenkman seems to know his way around a cliché, so that he can wring more suspense and surprise out of it than you'd expect. From what's in the microwave oven to the broken glass on the floor (will the blind girl step in it?!), we're kept pretty constantly on our toes.

Consider the opening scene in which an unfaithful wife is about to do the dirty with her lover when they hear something like an intruder downstairs. This is pure been-there-done-that stuff served up again, but with enough skilled touches in the script and direction that we follow along queasily.

Once this scene is out of the way, the movie shifts ahead to the same house with a new family now installed: Dad (Daniel Hugh Kelly, above) and his psychosomatically blind daughter (Noell Coet, below), who suffers from guilt over the car-accident death of her mom a few years back. Perfect victims, right? Subjected to a kind of home-invasion-cum-Wait-Until-Dark. So we're prepared to watch the killer go to town. Which he does, with relish, of course, but occasional restraint, as well. (This is but one part of the how-to-work-around-a-cliché lesson that the film provides.)

Performances are as good as those in the genre usually get, but I do wish that the writers here could have burnished the story and script a bit. One of the more noticeable problems: Why doesn't the daughter tell her father that her boyfriend has gone missing in the house? This might have saved a life. Oh, well. Saving lives is probably not the reason certain audiences flock to this kind of film.

Mischief Night -- via Specticast, and running 87 minutes -- will make its one-night-only, one-performance-only theatrical debut on Wednesday, October 30, Halloween eve, in cities all around the nation. Click here and scroll down to find a venue near you.