Moving on in the Tales of Terror series, Tales of Terror Vol.4 are, just like Vol.1-3, stories from a tv show that tell tales based on true supernatural encounters. In this fourth volume, there are 9 short stories. This DVD continues episodes from Part 3 with another 9 episodes from 25 to 33.
Don't Ever Open It (Kei Horie)
A girl is left to be home alone, and her grandfather tells her not to open a special cabinet/altar. When the man leaves, the little girl goes straight for the altar, opens it and another little girl pops out from within the cabinet. They start to play but soon the altar girl disappears, and later shows up again and tries to drag the other girls into the cabinet with her. She does not succeed in doing so and jumps back in the cabinet on her own.
This one was actually more stupid than scary. It has elements of ghosts but it wasn't very effective.
Getting Closer (Hiroshisa Sasaki)
A girl is house sitting and suddenly the picture disappers from the tv. She goes up to check what's wrong, and all of a sudden she sees her dog on the tv from inside the house she's in. She walks to the stairway where she finds some drool on the floor, and when she looks around, she sees herself being on the tv and that something's zooming in on her. She then wakes up, and when she looks at the tv next to her bed, she's on the tv again. Once again she wakes up, thinking it all was a bad dream, but then she sees some kind of ghost girl sitting not too far from her bed. Again, she wakes up and this time the ghost girl is sort of licking her face (now we know where the drool came from). Then she wakes up and it goes like that for a while.
Geez, I don't know how many times this girl woke up from having a bad dream. It was at least 6-7 times and it was really frustrating to watch. Also the ghost girl looked more ridiculous than scary so that didn't help either. It started off quite ok but got bad really fast.
Please Donít (Yudai Yamagudhi)
A guy walking around filming his family and every boring little thing one could possible think of. Even though this story is short, it goes on for way too long. But suddenly someone's at the front door and keeps pushing the door handle back and forth. (To be continued)...
No More, Please (Yudai Yamagudhi)
This story continues 2 weeks after the previous one 'Please Donít' left off, and the thing with the door handle is still going on every night for 10 minutes each time. By now, the family have gotten somewhat used to this strange phenomenon and just ignores it. But then one night they hear a loud bang and see that their tv has fallen over, and soon after, the microwave owen goes boom too. They call some spiritual guy who comes and takes a look at their house to get rid of the possible ghost that's there, terrorizing them night after night. The guy says that their house might be a passageway for the dead. (To be continued)...
Come, If You Dare (Yudai Yamagudhi)
This story continues from the previous one, 'No More, Please', and it has now been 3 months of weird happenings and the family has grown really sick of it. Since the spiritual guy couldn't help the family out, they call in some scientists and they actually seem to know what they're doing. It's explained to the family that people generate electromagnetic energy, and if all that energy gathers in one place, it causes people to hallucinate. Apparently it's called 'Poltergeist Phenomenon', and the scientists help the family to remove all the energy from their house. After that, the family seem to do ok, and there are no more strange things going on around their house. But one month later they wake up in the middle of the night from hearing some strange noises, and when they go into one of the rooms in the house, the room is packed with dead people. After that, the family decides it's time to move.
This story is quite a long one, at least in when comparing it to the other stories in the Tales of Terror series. It's divided into three episodes and deals with ghost encounters. It's never scary but still worked quite well, except for the first episode which felt like nonsense. In the third episode, we get to see the family being interviewed inbetween the telling of the actual story, just like it has happened to them for real. A pretty cool ghost story but that unfortunately lacked effective scares.
Fox and a Bath (Hiroshisa Sasaki)
This story was told by a man in the end from Vol.3, but felt quite boring as the viewer just got to see a man sit and tell the story to some girl. Here it's actually a filmed short story about a man who's driving in the countryside and suddenly gets extremely sleepy. He wakes up in a bathtub in a house, sitting in the same position as he did when he was driving with his hands on an imaginary steering wheel. A woman comes into the room where he's at and is apparently the owner of the house, and says that once in a while people show up in her bathtub.
This story was more fun than scary. Well maybe not fun as it was actually quite strange. Not the least bit memorable though.
An Interrogation (Kei Horie)
A guy is being interrogated by two police men after an accident. He tells the police that he was out driving when he suddenly saw a woman running towards his car. He tries to steer away from her and so crashes his car, and when he looks at the passenger seat, she lies there all tied up next to him. He closes his eyes and when he opens them again, the woman is gone. Suddenly the officer at the police station has trouble breathing and the woman who was running towards the man's car comes up behind him...
It started off quite cool but became quite lame really fast. Also, the story is way too short to be effective, and we don't get any background on any of the characters, so it was really hard to get into it.
Family Crest (Hiroshisa Sasaki)
A girl marries some guy and moves out to live with his family in the country. The family lives by old Japanese traditions, and the girl tries to adjust herself to that. One night she wakes up and sees some zombie samurai in her bedroom, and he's telling her that she's pregnant and to give him the baby. She replies that she's not pregnant, but later she finds out that she really is, and the samurai keep coming back to haunt her.
A zombie samurai sounds pretty cool eh? Well, it might sound cool, but watching it on screen here isn't that cool actually. Although I liked the story, and it looks quite ok as well, (a lot of these stories doesn't look that great).
Handprints (Takafumi Ota)
A man is in some room and pulls the curtains over the window. He then gets a strange phone call from his daughter but it seems to be a really bad connection and he can't make out what she wants to say. He then hears some noise and pulls away the curtains and sees ghostly white handprints all over the window.
Eh ok? I have no idea where the handprints came from or why they were there. The story was really short and suddenly there were handprints all over the window, the guy looked afraid and that was about it. I'm glad I don't have to watch Tales of Terror anymore, as I think this was the last one.
Tales of Terror Vol.4 turned out to be quite bad which was not very unexpected to begin with. Some stories have a lot of potential but they are just too short to be effective, while some stories don't make much sense at all. Since they are so short and you don't get to know that much about the characters, the ghosts or whatever, it's very hard to 'get into it' and be affected by the so-called scares. I'm glad that the series are over, or so I would think anyway. The best one turned out to be Vol.3 which featured the most interesting and 'scary' stories. But in the end, the whole series was never that good to begin with.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Tales of Terror from Tokyo 4
MOVIE YEAR: 2005
DIRECTOR: See next the title of each story
WRITING CREDITS: n/a
GENRE: Horror, Supernatural
CAST: Uncredited
COUNTRY: Japan
RUNTIME: 53 min
RATING: 3/10
Tales Of Terror Vol 4 Website/IMDB Click here
Tales Of Terror Vol 4 Trailer Click here
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