Chilling Visions has five stories based on the five senses.Smell. A mysterious but cheery sales lady appears at the door of some divorced loser and gives him a spray bottle of pheromones that will make him successful. It works but it also rots his skin where applied. He ends up dead and drops from his corpse are used to make more spray bottles.Sight. An ophthalmologist extracts some visual energy from his patients during eye exams and distills into drops that he then applies to his own eyes to see things his patients saw. He keeps dozens of bottles. When a pretty patient shows up beaten he asks her to send her abusive boyfriend. And with him he applied some mist to his eyes that drives him crazy. Violence between the two ensue.Touch. A family has a car accident out in the woods. The blind kid goes searching for help. He discovers the car was disabled due to a trap. He walks around, finds more traps, then a house where victims are who tell him of a villain who doesn't like to be touched. The kid leaves and runs into the crazy guy, who's also the boyfriend from the previous episode. But the kid is resourceful.Taste. A guy is taken in a limo to some corporation. He doesn't know where or why. Everyone acts weird. When he meets his appointment she offers him a job and warns him that if he refuses he'll be in some unspecified trouble. The job consists of him searching for and reassembling a song, a song that is said to kill the listeners. He refuses. The chick attacks him.Listen. Two video/sound techs and a camera girl receive some tapes about a Russian guy who composed a song that kills people who listen to it. The tapes involve a researcher in the past who's trying to get someone to play the song. They keep getting more tapes and time markers to reconstruct the whole thing. They succeed. In the tape everyone who plays the song gets sick. No one can finish it. Until the researcher destroys one player's ears. He plays the whole song and everyone in the room kill themselves. The two guys are afraid. The camera girl secretly uploads the song online.Chilling Visions has some good ideas and is somewhat original. But it just doesn't know how to effectively bring those ideas to screen. The first episode is filmed like a silly comedy complete with goofy and romantic music. The second episode wastes an intriguing idea and ends leaving you nowhere. The third episode has a good performance by the actor who plays the kid, it doesn't have any ideas but I guess is supposed to support the second story. The fourth is over the top and makes no sense but prepares you for #5 and gives you some background to the others. You see, in all of them there's hints of a corporation that is behind it all. Behind what? I guess in the end behind the attempt to kill everyone. The final episode is filmed in parts in POV style, plus the black and white footage of the researcher, but despite the style doesn't capture what should be pretty creepy. Overall, it would have been better had they worked out the purpose of the corporation a bit more. Or a bit less, it could have been like a surprise twist. Even though the stories are long enough, you can't really connect with any of the characters and that is a fatal flaw when you have stories that you don't know where they'll lead you.

This movie contradicts its own premise in a way. The short vignette format works very well for horror, maybe because we don't really want to stay in those designed to be unpleasant environs for way too long. Everyone can remember being exhausted by some bloody and horrific film going on and on, like a nightmare we'd much rather just wake up from. Once we meet the good guys and the bad guys and the severed heads start flying, we get the idea pretty quick. The great old Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock TV shows both used only very short tales that were just long enough, they led us into and back out again of an chilling or startling worldview in a way that was just complete enough to be satisfying and never too much to be dull, like a great restaurant that brings just enough to your plate, but not piled on with a ladle. The problem with this effort is that the brevity is actually too brief. It suggests a writer's laziness instead of a skilled and intuitive conciseness. After each segment we are surprised by the fade out and ask, "Wait. Is that all?" This is especially true of the middle film about a clever blind boy, we just barely meet him and he takes his leave, and he is an intriguing enough character that we would love to get to know him more. The 5 senses motif is really just a pose of course, like a writer's class exercise, it offers nothing substantial to increase interest and every storyline is pretty much unoriginal and forgettable except the final one about a song that kills people. That is just bizarre enough to leave a permanent mark. One cute trick the filmmakers use is to recycle the actors, proper names and places in unexpected ways in different stories so that we get to have fun keeping track and see who pops up again. I kept expecting some of them to wink at the camera and say "Hey! Remember me"? I would be happy to wave back.

"5 Senses of Fear" had a marketing campaign that gave me a lot of hope that it might inspire a resurgence in anthology based horror. Although there have been a lot of horror anthologies in the past decade, most have been rather lousy. The directors on the ads for "5 Senses of Fear" indicated they were hoping this would be the movie to put the new spark in anthology horror. I really hope that they are wrong.The reason horror anthologies work are because they are able to present the most important elements of a scary story without having to include any of the fluff. But I think that a lot of young directors don't understand that. They treat this movie as if an anthology is easier to make because there is less work in making a short movie. A short story often requires more work than a long one because it does not have the time to tell the story and must concentrate on the central theme. There is really almost no point to this movie at all. None of the stories has an interesting plot and absolutely nothing makes any sense whatsoever. As I sat and hoped each following story would get better, the movie just descended into the ranks of pure and utter stupidity. What each story lacked in plot, it more than made up for in cheap gross out tactics. The most common device is poking out eyes.The first story was about smell and it probably had the most story in it. A man is giving a bottle of cologne that makes him utterly irresistible to everyone. He tries to use it to get his wife back, but quickly finds it brings him the favor of anyone who smells it. The rub is that it slowly transforms him into a monster as it dissolves his life and flesh away. The shocking twist (and I use this term exceptionally lightly) involves his remains being used to make more of the cologne.The story about sight has an eye doctor who has the power to induce the power to see through others' eyes by potions he makes from his patients. He uses violent scenes to try and make a patient's boyfriend stop beating her, but it ends up empowering the boyfriend to murder.Touch involves a blind boy trying to find help for his parents when they are injured in a car wreck. He stumbles upon a man who doesn't like to be touched. This is the only somewhat interesting story in the entire anthology and it is due to the performance of the actor playing the blind boy. He is the only protagonist you can get behind, but this is not enough to save this movie.Taste is remarkably bad. It involves a lady who offers people a job and them violently kills them when they refuse. She puts on a big stupid mask and the stupidity flies off the screen.The last film takes the form of a found footage film; the most overused and highly misused form of horror film today. It involves a composer who composes a song that makes people commit suicide. It's idiotic and annoying to watch.This is one of the most disappointing movies I have ever seen. The plots are thin and remarkably bad even for a horror movie. It relies on gross outs displayed by third rate special effects. You'll find yourself wondering what the directors like so much about poking people in the eyes. As I mentioned in the beginning, horror anthologies can whittle a horror story down to its bare bones. By cutting the fluff out of the story, a good anthology can present really good stories. This is not one of those movies. It, in fact, does the exact opposite. There are no stories here, only fluff supported by attempts at gross outs. This movie is a remarkable failure and you should save yourself the time of watching it. It is pure and utter crap.The one star I gave this movie is way more than it deserves.

Saw this at the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival last night. This is a very cool concept for an anthology film. There are five segments, each one representing a different one of the five senses. I thought all of the shorts had a very unique "voice." Each segment had an unexpected take on the sense that was portrayed. I enjoyed the look of the films. We were told that Claudio Rietti shot most of the segments. The only segment that looked "different" was the "HEARING" segment, but that's because it was found footage, so it worked. Surprisingly, each story had a very different tone, which was cool.A few notes on each segment (MINOR SPOILERS): SMELL: Had a bit of dark humor throughout. The director said he was inspired by Tales From the Crypt, and it felt like a lost episode of that show. This was a pretty intricate story with a lot of cool elements. Mixed funny/gross/dramatic in a fun and weird way. Great music. The director and the main actors from this segment were there for a Q&A afterward. Fun to hear them talk about doing the gore effects.SIGHT: I enjoyed the performance of the "evil boyfriend." This segment also had some cool "vision effects." I felt the ending was predictable. However, the concept was very original. Cool sound design.TOUCH: Great performance by the little boy. The villain is the same actor as the "evil boyfriend" in SIGHT. Not sure if it was supposed to be the same character? That was a little confusing. Overall, though, cool story with good tension throughout. Cool camera work and "blind POV" shots.TASTE: This one looked really cool. Neat location, interesting setup. Drags a bit in the middle. I was antsy waiting for what was going to happen. The main character is going to an interview at a strange corporation. We see characters from the other segments that presumably work for this evil corporation, but that's not explained very well. Cool, bloody ending.LISTEN: Nice play on the found footage concept. Felt sort of like a horror version of the Dharma Initiative tapes from Lost. Good chemistry between the two leads. The ending felt rushed or poorly executed and didn't quite work for me. But it was great until the finale.After the five segments, the film just ends. I was disappointed with the ending. We never get any explanation of how these shorts are tied together. We see characters from all the shorts appear at the evil corporation in the TASTE segment. Also, we hear about the "Watershed" company. But, it's never really explained how the characters or worlds fit together or what the intent of the evil corporation is. I would have loved one last little segment at the end to sort of wrap it all up and give us some answers.Overall, I think it was a solid effort by everyone involved. We were told that each segment had only 4 days to shoot and a very tight budget. Considering those facts, the quality is EXTREMELY impressive. There aren't that many "scares" in the movie. Horrific things happen, but overall it's more suspense/thriller with some gross-out gore moments. I think SMELL and LISTEN stood out the most, maybe because they were first and last and had the longest running times. However, I really liked all the segments. Most anthology films have one or two good segments, but every segment in this film had an interesting story, good characters, and great production value. Also, I'm glad I got to see this on the big screen with an audience. It was a crowd-pleaser.NOTE: 5 Senses of Fear was produced for the Chiller Network. I never watch that channel, because it's not HD, but I might make an exception to watch this again on May 31st.