The Vault of Horror

(1973) **

Five very proper gentlemen, including the only real Doctor Who, step into an elevator and end up in the sub-level of a basement despite pressing buttons for other floors. As the elevator door opens they find a brightly lit lounge with a table replete with fine brandy. Unfazed, as the British tend to be, Doctor Who notes, “Well we might as well make the best of it” and the gentlemen settle in to regale each other with tales of terror while enjoying libations.


"It's great seeing you and all that but you might want to leave before sunset. I'm just sayin'"

In “Midnight Mess” a man tracks down his long lost sister in a creepy remote village. Despite being warned by a villager to leave the town before dark and later being warned by his sister that 17 bodies have been found drained of blood, he hangs around. Guess what happens?


"Your OCD is really annoying"!

In “The Neat Job” an obsessive-compulsive man is preparing to get married however when his fiancé moves into his rockin’ 70s pad he is dismayed to learn that she is messy, which does not bode well with his fastidiousness. He learns the hard way that there is such a thing as being “too neat”.


"I'd kill for this stupid rope trick!"

In “This Trick’ll Kill You” a magician murders a swami in India in order to acquire his amazing rope trick. This backfires on him terribly as you might imagine.


"Oops"

In “Bargain In Death” a man conspires with a friend to make it appear that he is dead in order to collect on his insurance money. He takes a drug to slow down his heart and is subsequently buried. Before his friend is able to dig him up, however, he runs into a problem he did not anticipate…



Finally, in “Drawn and Quartered” Doctor Who is an eccentric artist working in Haiti. After learning that he has been ripped-off by his agent, he purchases some voodoo, which enables him to destroy things simply by drawing them and destroying them. His first bad decision is to draw a self-portrait…

But that’s not all, folks. As the 5 very proper men drink and tell stories they suddenly realize that they are in more trouble than they thought when the elevator door opens and they realize that they are not where they thought they were…

The Vault of Horror has no game whatsoever. Out of the 5 stories 2 were (marginally) entertaining but none deserved to be in an anthology motion picture. The tales are light on scares and at times unintentionally funny. Whenever I watch these anthologies I’m always struck by how good the Twilight Zone was and wonder why no one has been able to come close to replicating the feel and scares of those creepy stories. Apparently there are several other anthologies from the same studio including Asylum, Tales From the Crypt, and Torture Garden.