Runtime: Despite what it says on Shudder's site, it is 94 minutes rather than 104 minutes long
Directed by: Roy Ward Baker
Starring: Vincent Price, John Carradine, Donald Pleasence, Britt Ekland, Stuart Whitman, Patrick Magee
From: Chips Productions/Sword & Sorcery
Vincent Price and John Carradine dance to New Wave music, need I say anything more?
Besides not having watched anything on Shudder in what seems like a few weeks, I know for certain it's been many months since I've seen any horror anthologies. As I literally have a list on Letterboxd of this particular genre, it was about damn time this was watched on Shudder. I've seen plenty of Amicus anthologies in the past and while that studio had closed a few years beforehand, this was produced by one of the studio's heads, Milton Subotsky... and if this had more of a budget it would have felt more like one of those efforts. While it's a shame that the monsters you see in the titular club are obviously human beings wearing cheap masks from the early 80's UK version of a Spirit Halloween store, the stories were all interesting to me.
The framing story featured Vincent Price and John Carradine-one of this movie's benefits is that it has a nice cast. Price plays a vampire (apparently the only time he ever did so, believe it or not) and Carradine was Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes... who was a real life horror author that actually worked on this script; imagine an anthology where someone played Stephen King. Vincent invites John to the club, which plays NEW WAVE music. Even better, several performances from new wave acts are shown throughout. None of them I'd heard of before but most have Wikipedia entries so it's me not them... in addition, an act that had started to become popular at the time has background music in one scene and only later in the decade did they become famous worldwide: UB40! No kidding.
Anyhow, this anthology has a trio of tales which are all different from each other, not to mention different from the norm. They feature a fictional creature who falls in love, a vampire hunt from the perspective of the hunted and a creepy village that has other fictitious creatures. The famous faces present in those stories include Donald Pleasence, Britt Ekland, Stuart Whitman, & Patrick Magee. At times the movie is rather light in tone-it was an easy watch. And yes the two stars do dance to a New Wave song in the final act; hilarious, although not as much so as Christopher Lee and his appearance in a New Wave club in that astoundingly bad first sequel to The Howling. Even if it's not my favorite anthology from the time period, it was a pleasant diversion.
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