Trapped Ashes (2006)
(In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) Perhaps the most difficult trick in writing horror movies is making you believe in the impossible—the necessary suspension of disbelief in order to accept that there’s a supernatural entity hunting our characters, or that occult forces are influencing the plot. Much of this willingness to play along is helped by what viewers want to see: if we’re paying to see the monster, the monster can’t make it on-screen fast enough. But horror can take this suspension of disbelief for granted, and any film that doesn’t put in the necessary work to make us believe places itself in trouble. The problem with horror anthology Trapped Ashes isn’t necessarily the over-the-top nature of its segments, its copious nudity or inconsistent tone—it starts in the framing device, as a bunch of strangers visiting a movie studio are lazily brought to a locked room and asked to spill their secrets. Nothing about the framing device makes sense, especially the passing tourists’ eagerness to go when they should not and unanimously get trapped on a set. Henry Gibson may be a lot of fun as a tour guide, but he’s also stuck in a script that doesn’t even put in the minimal effort to make us believe. Things don’t get better once the segment starts: in the opening one, an ambitious starlet doesn’t even blink when told that her breast implants are made out of human tissues. When, later on, her breasts start exsanguinating her intimate partners (don’t think too much about the mechanics of that), we viewers shrug, having done the whole, “Are you kidding? What did you expect?” thing a few minutes earlier. Horror fans will note that a number of cult-favourite genre directors are involved in the anthology: Joe Dante does the framing segments, Ken Russell does the bloodthirsty breasts one (which may explain a lot), Sean S. Cunningham goes to Japan for ghostly hijinks, and SFX supervisor John Gaeta turns in a tale that draws parallels between pregnancy and tapeworms. The one promising segment that should have worked well, about a filmmaker and his undead lover, falls flat on screen. Not that it’s a lone misfire: The Gaeta segment never takes off despite a squirm-inducing premise and the Japan-set segment doesn’t go anywhere either. The Russell one may be weird and poorly justified, but at least it does have an odd sense of humour. As for Dante’s contribution, it has good bits and pieces even if it doesn’t manage to put them together effectively. In that, the framing device does feel representative of a film that could have been much better but appears satisfied to coast on audiences doing most of the work for them. Trapped Ashes is not a film that works on anyone with slightly higher expectations than basic horror tropes.
