Spooks & Creeps (2004)

Titling tips 1: If it's not racist on purpose, don't put racial slurs in the title.

Genre: Horror Thriller Shorts

Starring: Ewan MacGregor (Moulin Rouge!; The Pillow Book), Rebecca Gayheart (Shadow Hours; Urban Legend)

Directed By: Sam Bozzo, Jeff Stark and more

Overview: A series of six spooky little stories to make you shiver.

Acting: The big name in this is Ewan, who has no speaking part, and the short itself is less than five minutes, though it's a good one. Still for them to say Alice Cooper is in this is a stretch. He narrates a one line intro for the first short, then when it ends, he tells you to shut up and leave. The acting and direction showed signs of the low budget, but it was fine.
Rating: 6

Cinematography: The quality suffers from time to time, but each short has it's own particular style and some pretty interesting effects, camera wise. This isn't a big gore movie, more thrills and suspense than anything else, but the look was well thought out and a lot of effort went into it.
Rating: 7

Script: The writing excels in Holiday on The Moon, but the rest were simply passable shorts. Again, nothing bad but nothing worth mentioning. It's typical low budge experienced directors and writers. They may be going places, but this is a stepping stone.
Rating: 6

Plot: The stories were fine but really only half of them I really liked a lot, and they were the short ones. Every story has it's element of predictability, but a couple have a neat twist, and the short but sweet Desserts (pardon the pun) will give you a grin. Fine but nothing special.
Rating: 6

Mood: The moods tried to be very rich, in each short. It was quite obvious a lot of effort went into them. But the amateurish flaw of trying too hard and adding too much is very much there in too many of the pieces. Overall I wasn't as captivated as I would have liked and I found myself getting up a lot, doing this and that. This was fine, but not great.
Rating: 6

Oh you're a pumpkin! How precious! It's just too bad I only have candies left for butternut squashes, sorry!

Overall Rating: 62% (Bland, and Neither Spooky or Creepy)

Aftertaste: When rating films like this one, I feel sometimes that I'm jilting you, my audience, since I have really not much to say about it other than 'passable' and 'fine'. I guess that's what this little 'Aftertaste' section is all about, making up for it and telling you that if your friend lends it to you and you need to kill 20 minutes here and there, go ahead take a gander, but given that this isn't even listed on IMDB, good luck finding it. If you don't find it, don't worry, there's better wastes of time that are more convenient than this.