The Theatre Bizarre boasts seven directors, nine screenwriters, and nineteen people with varying producing credits to their names. It's a horror anthology, you see, comprised of six shorts and one wraparound segment. As a collective whole, it's a little like a hideous laboratory monster stitched together out of spare parts by people with no skills in science, medicine, or even basic needlework. As individual stories, the parts are rotten, as if they had been extracted from subjects several months dead. Only one piece is a fresh specimen; it's an honest, though provoking, and surprisingly poignant little story that addresses life's darker aspects with dignity. It's the only segment with an emotional core, so I think of it as the film's heart harvested from the body of a good person and beautifully preserved in a glass jar.
The framing segments, directed by Jeremy Kasten, are constructed as live stage performances in an abandoned theater. The only apparent audience member is a disturbed young woman (Virginia Newcomb), who lives across the street in an apartment bedroom with cut up and tattered theater paraphernalia plastered to the walls. On stage are a series of actors caked with unnatural makeup; they're made to resemble automatons, and their static movements are enhanced with a slew of mechanical sound effects. The emcee (Udo Kier), whose narrations are a series of nonsensical ruminations about stories and storytellers, becomes more natural-looking as the short films progress. The young woman in the audience, meanwhile, becomes increasingly unnatural in appearance. Visually creative though they may be, the wraparound segments make no adequate connection between the individual stories and exist primarily to be gawked at.
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