5/10
'House Of The Dead' is a better title!
11 August 2013
Warning: Spoilers
An adulterous businessman gets lost in the rain and a mortician gives him shelter in his funeral parlour, who shows the man some of the corpses being embalmed on the premises. Each one has a tale about how they met their untimely demises: a school teacher who hates children is frightened to death; a predatory photographer who kills his unwitting subjects on-camera is eventually caught and executed; a self-inflated criminologist meets his British rival and in trying to out-do each other, discovers his nemesis is prepared to kill to be the best; and finally a selfish office worker is lured and held captive by an unseen assailant for an extremely long time but soon dies after he is inexplicably suddenly released. The man is told they all were victims of their own errant ways. When he asks about a final empty coffin, the mortician replies it is for him!

The individual stories and the main framing story are written in a very comic-book or pulp-novel way. The second one about the photographer is probably the worst one but is fortunately brief enough not to be a problem. Despite some really awful music, ropey acting, and what appears to be lighting supervised by a blind man, this collection of shorts is fairly well directed enough to be entertaining. I am confused with the movie's original title of 'Alien Zone' - there are no aliens at all in it! Clearly they were actually going for something like 'The Twilight Zone' and were meaning 'Alien' in a more literal sense, as in "unknown" rather than "being from outer-space"! Even still, it's not such a great title; 'House Of The Dead' makes more sense.
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