Tomb of Terror

(2004) **

Tomb of Terror answers the age old question, "What can be accomplished when you give a monkey a video toaster, some footage from other movies, and one night's free reign in the A/V room at your local high school?" In this case, surprisingly, the monkey didn't shit all over the place or chew on any of the blank VHS tapes (or at least, not according to the IMDb trivia entries) but he did manage to make this mess of an anthology.

Dark Angel: Ascent from Hell -- A beautiful denizen of hell yearns for escape from her demonic duties and sneaks out a back exit into Arkham, MA. She ingratiates herself to a hunky-but-pure-hearted doctor, and while living with him, moonlights as a bringer of justice. She prowls the streets at night, spotting evil-doers and, her eyes blazing red fire, she rips out their spines, handing them over to the evil-doers' victims as a souvenir. She takes down Arkham's corrupt mayor before being shot and having to go home. She's granted freedom from hell later and arises in a black wedding gown to live with Dr. Hunk MD.

Infinite Evil -- A recent ex-con tracks down a cemetery where his crook father buried a fortune before being carted off to prison. But his expedition coincides with both an attempt by some thugs to hijack the treasure and an attempted ritualistic destruction of the cemetery by a band of well-armed crusaders. Turns out, the cemetery is haunted by a large, extended family of ghouls of which, it turns out the ex-con is a descendant. The thugs wave their guns around and occasionally fuck up and get them taken away by the good guys who also fuck up and lose the guns back to the bad guys, etc.. Nobody gets the money, the cemetery gets dynamited, and I stifled a yawn.

Eternal Damnation -- A boy is sent to a remote German reform school, where rich American expatriates send their problem children. The school is run by a cold headmistress, aided by her gang of teenage gay-jock bullies and her teenage daughter. Only later it turns out that the girl isn't her daughter and that she and the protagonist are (as revealed through flashbacks) brother and sister, who have been chosen by a demon to help facilitate his entry into our world. When the demon attacks, his eyes glow red and he rips out the heart of his victim. The boy maintains his purity and kills the sister, foiling the demons plans. 5 years later, a rich French entrepreneur buys the property for his summer home. While snooping around the property, the daughter finds the demon's necklace, whereupon she is immediately possessed. From now on I'm staying as far as possible from people with glowing red eyes.

If it sounds like my explanations were jumpy and inconsistent, it's only because the movie itself played that way. I didn't know it at the time of viewing, but I learned afterwards from IMDb, that Tomb of Terror was actually comprised of hack-and-slash edited footage from three B-movies: Dark Angel: The Ascent (1994), H.P. Lovecraft's Lurking Fear (1994), and Talisman (1998). If I may suggest, calling any of these movies "HP Lovecraft's ______" is like impregnating yourself with someone's discarded condom and calling your mutant-bastard child "our son."

No surprises save for those wrought by poor editing, and those only of the, "Whoa, wait a minute. How'd we wind up here?" variety.

Surprise appearances by the following folks you've seen before in better movies: Vincent Schiavelli, Nicholas Worth, Jeffrey Combs ("See? We totally get to call our dumb movie, "H.P. Lovecraft's Lurking Fear" -- we cast Herbert West!"), and that's it, the rest is lame, lame, lame.