Southbound [Blu-ray]

If you want grim reapers, satanic cults, unlucky hitchhikers, devil worship, the worst leg injury ABSOLUTELY EVER, amateur surgery, home invasions, demons and trips to Hell and back, then this is for you. Not all the short films hit home runs but the few great moments make it worth the gory price of admission. Overall, this is a pretty good anthology.If you've followed my reviews for a while now then you ought to know that I love horror anthologies. Typically either all of the short stories are directed by one man and written by another (e.g., Creepshow), or each short story has a different writer and director (e.g., V/H/S). However, this anthology features five stories with six writers and six directors: the trio of Radio Silence (V/H/S segment 10/31/98), Patrick Horvath (The Pact II), David Bruckner (V/H/S segment Amateur Night) and Roxanne Benjamin (V/H/S, V/H/S 2, V/H/S Viral).Unlike many anthologies which feature a story teller or wraparound story (e.g., Creepshow, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie), this takes the approach of linked stories in which one component of the previous story links us to the next (much as in Trick ‘r Treat)--although it does loop us back to the opening story.The Way In. The opening finds two men driving southbound on a desert highway. Covered in blood, trapped in some sort of timeloop and followed by several black flying angels of death, they have clearly done something very bad. This was a really sleek and cool short. The special effects and CGI are impressive. At one point a very cool looking grim reaper reaches down a guy's throat tearing his mouth and jaw into a macabre gaping mess.Siren. The next morning three girls in the same area hit the road only to get the cliché flat tire. But fret not--they're offered a ride, dinner and a place to say with a weird couple having a dinner party that evening with their equally weird neighbors and their even weirder twin sons. When they say grace let's just say it sounded like they weren't thanking our Heavenly Father. Outside of some vomit and a lot of tongue-in-cheek social awkwardness, this short was relatively uneventful. Somewhat interesting, but somewhat boring as well.The Accident. One of the girls (Fabianne Therese; Starry Eyes) from Siren escapes the satanic ritual and is brutally, gorily and hilariously hit by a car, the driver of which now endures a most stressful and unhelpful 911 call trying to help her--it's both soul-crushing and hilarious. Her legs are bent all over the place, she's convulsing…I was shocked the guy didn't panic and run. He takes her to what seems to be a recently abandoned town and into an empty hospital where he is advised by some surgeon (over the phone who knows far too much about the situation) to set her broken leg, intubate her, make an incision under her ribs to insert his hand inside her thorax to compress her lung! This is BRUTAL. First off, I never thought a broken leg scene in a horror movie could make me reel, wince, yell at the screen and uncomfortably laugh more than Insidious Chapter 3 (2015). But this movie wins--again folks, I was yelling at the screen LOL. It's so gleefully macabre and awful and wonderful as we hear the bloody tissue twist and slice and see the victim's face as she, fully awake, endures all this. WOOOOOW this short was amazing!Compounding all this is that after he fails to save her, he is somehow trapped in the abandoned hospital! This short alone is worth watching this movie.Jailbreak, the fourth short, strangely deviates from the more distinctly linked second and third as a man battles demons in a gory bar fight in search of his sister, who evidently has been in Hell for a long time. The special effects range from marginal to decent with some gooey splatters, but the story was completely uncompelling. I felt no satisfaction by the ending other than the relief that we were moving on to the work of other filmmakers.The Way Out feels a lot like the home invasion from You're Next (2013). It's a little scary, moderately creepy, and packs some good shock value as a tough girl stands up to defend her family from a group of murderous masked home intruders. But what makes this final short interesting is that it links back all the way to the The Way In, which felt like the beginning of our timeline as we watched. Some of the "gates to Hell" CGI were a little cheesy, but they depicted some cool infernal imagery nonetheless.I thought The Way In was nifty, especially how it linked to The Way Out, and that The Accident alone was worth the price of admission. Sure, not all the shorts were awesome. But therein lies the luxury of anthology films; it takes about ten minutes to figure out you don't like a particular short, and by then you only have about ten more minutes until it's over and you're on to the next. And because each short has a different writer and director, you can rest assured that it will have a completely different style.This was entertaining and at times pretty clever. The big take home message for me to sell you on this though would have to be the injuries of the girl in The Accident. WORST BROKEN LEG EVERRRRRR! Mercy! Overall, this is a pretty good anthology.

(Review contains minor spoilers, but it's okay because the movie isn't very good)This is an anthology of four-and-a-half* horror stories all taking place along the same desolate stretch of desert highway.Let's get the good out of the way quickly.There are a few effective scares, and a decent amount of gore if that's your thing. There are some creatures seen in the beginning and the end that are genuinely freaky-looking. This movie contains one of the most disturbing depictions of a gruesome, traumatic car accident I've ever seen - which walks determinedly along the line between horror and black comedy for its entire portion of the film. It *might* be worth a watch if that sounds interesting to you. That said...For any plot, you need four things:1. A beginning.2. A middle.3. An ending.4. An explanation for the things that happen.Every story in this anthology seems to be missing at least one of the first three pieces, and *all of them* are severely lacking in the fourth one. Don't get me wrong, I don't need my hand held while I'm led along a path lit with blazing neon signs explaining every last detail to me, but there should be at least enough breadcrumbs for me to come to an understanding if I give it enough thought. I should not, at the end of the movie, be missing big important pieces of the backstory, or wondering why one of the main characters was even involved at all, or how normal people who don't belong in Purgatory (yes, it's Purgatory all along, very clever, movie) could manage to get there.Horror movies typically need an additional thing: why the bad things are happening to the main cast. Even if it's for a stupid or unfair reason, there needs to *be* a reason, usually involving something the protagonist did to deserve it at least a little bit. Those teenagers are getting slashed up because they went to Camp Crystal Lake and Jason is a murderer. Naomi Watts is being stalked by a stringy-haired ghost girl because she watched an evil tape. The Creed child is a murderous zombie because their idiot father buried them in a cursed cemetery. That kind of thing. But Southbound comes up short in this department: Murder victims' corpses sprout hideous malformed Grim Reaper-like creatures because [scene missing]. The girl band members fall prey to a cult because they behaved perfectly reasonably. Lucas has to perform horrifying amateur surgery because he did the right thing. None of it works well.Finally, one other thing that *anthologies* need, specifically, is for the stories to be connected in a way that's logical and consistent, even if it's just a framing device. V/H/S has the wraparound story where they're watching horrific things happen on tapes. Creepshow cuts away to the comic books with the Creep between each tale, and also has a wraparound. But the way the stories are connected in Southbound are as follows: the characters from parts 1 and 2 are briefly seen in adjacent motel rooms; one of the characters from 2 is hit by a car and then 3 is a story about the driver; the driver from 3 is briefly on the phone with a minor character from 4 who then disappears from the plot; a character from 4 momentarily crosses paths with a character from 5; and then 5 turns out to be the first half of 1, revealing out of nowhere that the whole thing is a time loop, although said loop has basically no impact on the plot.One last complaint: the girl gets hit by the car because she makes the dumbest possible decision in that situation, standing smack in the middle of the lane to flag down a ride *long after it becomes apparent that the car isn't slowing down.* Like, any person with even a sliver of sense would have at least tried to move out of the way once it was *obvious* that the car wasn't gonna slow down.Anyway. Not a very good movie. ☠️☠️/ 5

Southbound will feel almost instantly familiar to fans of the VHS franchise, as it surfs a very similar tone: - one of dark, nightmarish scenarios where you're given very little information about what's happening but have to sit back for the ride and take it on faith that the pieces will slot together and make sense at some stage. It can be a very effective method for a horror anthology, as it gives a degree of free reign for the film-makers to shock and disgust you without yet having to make a lick of sense, and this can result in some truly startling and unsettling imagery and events. In this case, viewers who weren't fans of VHS's shaky-cam 'found footage' approach need not worry: these are almost exclusively filmed in a more traditional cinematic style - although with a degree of fast panning and a lack of gloss that helps to enhance the 'realism' and immediacy of events. The opening episode is a great scene setter, as we meet two inexplicably bloodied men in a speeding pickup truck, and start to glimpse terrible spectral, skeletal things seemingly following them... There are several chapters that follow, and all hew close to the effective horror angle of people out of their depth in circumstances that are far worse than they imagined they could be. A few split second moments where some CGI just becomes noticeable (it's largely very good), one slightly flat chapter, and just a little too much mystery conspire to rob this of a fifth star: - sometimes it's nice to pull back the curtain a little and give the audience just a bit more of an explanation about what's transpired. Here, you're left with almost no explanation at all for who or what is behind it all, and how some of the characters link together. While that's eerie, it also robs you of a little bit of satisfaction.However, in terms of acting, chills, gore and intrigue, here's hoping for a Southbound 2.

Interesting anthology and interwoven stories about in a nutshell getting a second chance from the grim reaper, if you don't do the right thing then you will relive your nightmare journey over and over again.Film takes place on a desolate road in smallville, USA. Two guys are on the run from something and are blood stained. Other story is about a band of women on their way to the next gig, another involves a man trying to track down his sister and another has a man run over a woman, who does his best to save her in an empty hospital. A jump moments, but its the direction and production values that really stick out well. Southbound came and went which is unfair because its much better than have that happen to it. It's also the type of movie that requires your full attention, there are a lot of messages in here, through the local DJ who we never see to subtle notices and panels. DJ is voiced by Larry Fessenden, Eerie little number that never spoon feeds us which is pretty much perfect horror material.

A great way to do an anthology movie! This one flows ftom one story to the other very smoothly without the need for the old "Twilight Zone" intro and review to each segment.Coming in at just 85mins I was surprised at how quickly the time went.This film will let you just watch a movie or make you think a little without being pretentious BS.As usual I watched this blind as I hate spoilers and hope that if you are in anyway a horror fan you will enjoy this too.Only a cast and crew commentary as an extra on this DVD but for about 6 quid as a new release, I can't complain

Unsettling, creepy, disturbing and seedy.Loved it. A film that you need to pay attention to ( yes, talking to reviewers (sic) who were not equipped to understand it) as the threads throughout the anthology require an attention to detail. Great work.

I must say in recent years I have found it hard to find genuinely scary new horror films but this was genuinely scary even when you watch it more than once. I don't think anyone could predict what would happen next in any part of the film. A great, great film....horror-makers watch and learn.