3’S A SHROUD *** U.K. 2012 85 mins Dir : Dan Brownlie, David V.G. Davies, Andy Edwards
A modern British horror anthology film that follows in the footsteps of ‘TALES FROM THE CRYPT‘ and ‘ASYLUM‘. Suzi Lorraine stars as the babysitter whos job it is to look after a little boy with a Teddy bear who gets angry if she doesn’t tell him a bedtime story. The babysitter, the boy and the bear will be the wraparound story for this feature that holds the whole film together. So begins Suzi Lorraine’s tale of the people who used to live in the boy’s house, a man whos girlfriend believes her husband is cheating and the husband who must take his medication otherwise something bad might happen. An easy opening tale of mental breakdown to wet your appetite.
But the boy and his bear wants more so now we get the tale of a photographers love for a model that turns to obsession, featuring the ‘BASKET CASE‘ esque creature in the basement that wants her all to itself. Emily Booth turns up to do some screaming and shouting and meets an unhappy end. Of course the boy and his bear aren’t satisfied with that story so we get our final tale to put the boy to sleep. A barmaid closes up for the night and discovers three of her friends hiding in the pub. They don’t want to go when she tells them to go, even more so when they say they want to throw her a surprise party. Some people are so ungrateful. It is Halloween night and what do four women alone in a bar do, summon spirits of course in the supposedly haunted bar. The barmaid is wearing a watch that the deceased girl was also wearing when she died but this has its own power, the power to give the wearer a Bill Murray ‘GROUNDHOG DAY‘ experience. So the barmaid finds out some nasty things about her friends and goes about knocking them off one by one. Back to the boy and his ungrateful bear which sees Suzi Lorraine having enough and saying its bedtime. The boys mother played by Dani Thompson comes home to see her boy to sleep, a terrible scream occurs and Suzi Lorraine goes to investigate. We then see both of these scream queens slashed up on the floor, I guess that Teddy bear really did want one more story. Some decent acting from all involved and it is always nice to see scream queens in a film together doing their thing. Very end of the film has some great slasher SFX on Suzi Lorraine and Dani Thompson. Overall this was a well crafted anthology with only one weak story but the best of the lot has to be the mental breakdown story that opens the film.
Review by Peter ‘Witchfinder‘ Hopkins
