The Theatre Bizarre (Buddy Giovinazzo, David Gregory, Douglas Buck, Jeremy Kasten, Karim Hussain, Richard Stanley & Tom Savini, 2011)

7.5/10
A horror anthology featuring seven different directors contributing their shorts, it was mostly what I expected - fun and gory and nothing too earth-shattering, but nothing to hate either.
The first one was Richard Stanley's The Mother of Toads, about a naive American couple vacationing in France being suckered in by a strange old woman who turns out to be the titular mother in question. The plot is thin and everything's reminiscent of a Dario Argento film, good and bad.
Next was Buddy Giovinazzo's I Love You. A woman is trying to leave her possessive, paranoid husband and when he finally gets her to tell him why, she reveals a lengthly list of one-night stands, flings, and relationships conducted behind his back. The acting is on two wildly different levels (the woman great, the husband brutal) and the whole thing is a build-up to a very overdone twist, but a suicide as the final money shot is really well done and worth waiting for.
Tom Savini's Wet Dreams is about a wife's revenge on her physically abusive husband, told via what may or may not be dreams the two of them are having. It's unapologetically incoherent ("surreal", if you will), but the gore is well done and it has a great sense of humor.
Douglas Buck's The Accident is about a woman answering her daughter's questions about death after the two of them witness a young motorcyclist crash on the road ahead of them. It contains barely a trace of anything remotely 'horror' related but even that aside, it's not terribly interesting and just seems wildly out of place here. Reviewer shorthand would probably call it "haunting" or "atmospheric" but it really wasn't either. "Elegiac" maybe.
Karim Hussain's Vision Stains has a really promising premise - about a woman who kills other women, extracts the fluid from their eyeballs and injects it into her own, allowing her to see their memories and write their stories. Unforunately, maybe due to the time constraints, it doesn't really go anywhere interesting. But the eyeball effects are well done and sure to make anyone cringe.
David Gregory's Sweets is the last and best one, about a candy-obsessed couple on the last legs of their food-fuelled relationship, which has become degraded and disgusting, and an ensuing surreal "Grand Guignol" of food and gluttony. It's gross, often hilarious, bizarre and original.
The stories are all strung-together and bookended by Jeremy Kasten's Theatre Guignol, featuring a girl who goes to a broken-down old-timey theatre where a mannequinish Udo Kier presents each of the stories, accompanied by a mannequin representing the story to come. The colors are beautiful and everything comes across appropriately campy and creepy.