A NIGHT OF HORROR: NIGHTMARE RADIO / CERT: TBA / DIRECTOR: OLIVER PARK, JASON BOGNACKI, A.J. BRIONES, JOSHUA LONG, SERGIO MORCELILLO, ADAM O’BRIEN, LUCIANO ONETTI, NICOLÁS ONETTI, PABLO S. PASTOR, MATTHEW RICHARDS / SCREENPLAY: MAURO CROCHE, MICHAEL L. FAWCETT, MICHAEL KRAETZER, GUILLERMO LOCKHART, MATTHEW RICHARDS, SANTIAGO TOBOADA / STARRING: IAN COSTELLO, MUUCHELLE COSTELLO, CLARA KOVACIC / RELEASE DATE: TBC
A late night radio host fills the airwaves with tales of encroaching death and supernatural terror, regaling his listeners and inviting them to contribute their own stories and experiences. As the night stretches into the small hours, a series of mysterious phone calls pulls him into a world of terror far more personal.
The best anthologies are ones that ultimately have a purpose and function as a whole either thematically or content-wise. A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio is not one of them. It doesn’t help that the shorts were not actually made for the anthology, but assembled from previously filmed material then strung together with a framing device of the radio DJ that does little more than introduce them, like an excessively bearded Crypt Keeper who has swapped bad puns for cheesy dialogue.
The wraparound story does itself have a small plot but is interspersed too little to make any kind of impact, and as the film goes on for so long by the time it comes around to be revealed it’s become unimportant, ultimately being just a jarring way of ending the film on some unconvincing ambiguity as if that neatly wraps things up rather than posing more questions. It’s entirely possible that the shorts were intended to introduce themes and concepts that tie into this ultimate revelation, but it doesn’t always work, leaving the collection feeling highly disjointed and reinforcing its artificial construction.
Taken individually, some of the tales are suitably eerie, such as Post-Mortem Mary, featuring the creepy experiences of a young girl working with her mother as a corpse photographer; In the Dark, Dark Woods, a fairy tale about an invisible woman and the evil she perpetrates from a life confined to the shadows; or The Disappearance of Willie Bingham, seeing a convicted murderer undergoing a series of retributive amputations ordered by the family of his victim. However, by and large they blur together into a series of uninspired twists that inspire little other than an awaiting for their inevitable final revelation.
The tales are so disparate there is not much to warrant them being brought together like this, with the only real theme being a disproportionately high recurrence of young women being stalked, abused, assaulted or otherwise menaced. You’d have really thought we’d reached a point where we can do better than this.
Nightmare Radio is mildly entertaining as a film, but despite its moderate running time still feels stretched out for far too long with little in the way of true development to maintain much interest for the viewer, and then once it’s finally got where it’s going it just… ends.
