Trapped Ashes

REVIEW
Creeping from the imaginations of five bona fide thrill-makers, co-directors Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th), John Gaeta (in charge of visual effects for The Matrix), Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop), Ken Russell (Altered States and former festival Phantasmagoria Award Recipient) and Joe Dante (Gremlins) fashion together a sometimes comic and often bloody anthology of shock that stems from a Hollywood studio tour gone awry. A nosy group of tourists find themselves trapped inside a carnival-esque torture chamber after they ignore warnings not to enter a “haunted” dwelling that formerly belonged to a deceased movie maestro. They are then forced to divulge their deepest darkest fears if they are to have any hope of escape. The framing device sets up episodes of “The Outer Limits”-inspired horror that include a fable of blood-sucking breast implants, a horrific parasitic sibling, a demonic sex fantasy and a cautionary tale of cursed adulteration. Henry Gibson (Nashville) plays the disarmingly oddball tour guide and B-movie veteran John Saxon (Nightmare on Elm Street) is a guest aboard this collective trip to terror!