TRAPPED ASHES

OK, when you think "erotic horror," you usually think of some atrocious late-night Skinemax feature with tons of bad acting, boobs, and a very cheesy ghost or monster thrown in for good measure. There are a handful of truly scary movies I have seen that had erotic undertones, and this was one of them.

Six strangers get VIP tickets to a tour of a Hollywood studio lot, with an elderly tour guide to drive them around. Two couples, an older guy (longtime B movie fixture John Saxon), and a single girl. As they are being driven around they see the famous spook house from the movie "Mysterium" and ask the tour guide if they can go inside. Once in, all passages lead to a central dining room - but then the doors and hallways close off behind them and they cannot escape. The tour guide, caught in the central room with them, suggests that they are being manipulated into re-enacting the movie, in which a group of strangers shared their most horrifying personal stories. After some arguing, they decide to go along.

Aspiring actress Phoebe goes first. She explains that, after being turned down by several movie roles, she had decided on breast augmentation. The clinic she went to specialized in a new form of boob job: using actual breast tissue harvested from cadavers instead of silicon or saline. She's a little nervous but goes thru with it anyway. The surgery sequence is VERY graphic and nasty, btw. She immediately starts getting movie roles, but then she discovers that her new boobs are carnivorous and require human blood to survive. However, the upside is that they constantly replenish her skin and internal organs, so she will never age. You heard me right, B-movie fans - VAMPIRE BOOBS. What a concept!!!!!

The next story is told by one of the men whose wife is also in the room. He explains how she was dragged into hell by the spirit of a Buddhist monk who had hung himself in a cemetery, then come back from the dead and seduced her. (Yes, corpse-boinking!) The abbot of the Buddhist temple gives him a prayer written on a piece of paper, and he has to go through a cave into the bowels of Buddhist hell (I didn't even think they HAD one . . . ) and force his wife to swallow the paper in order to bring her out.

The third story is told by Max, a retired Hollywood producer. He explained how his best friend Stanley, a legendary screenwriter, acquired this really hottie girlfriend who kept making passes at him. One day he went over to the guy's house to find he wasn't there and the girlfriend was. His friend never came home - making a film in New York, then moving to Germany. He lived there with the girl until she tired of him and left one day. Forty-five years later, he hears that Stanley has died, and he gets a package in the mail with some ancient film footage from the 1890's which shows that the girlfriend was in fact an immortal, bloodsucking WITCH!

Last of all, the unaccompanied female of the bunch tells a story about her twin - but her twin isn't human, not even half a human like the infamous protagonist in BASKET CASE. Her twin is a tapeworm that her mother could not get rid of without jeapordizing her pregnancy, so the two came into the world psychically linked. And when her mom is committed to an insane asylum, the little girl has to take responsibility for FEEDING her hungry twin. Who is on the menu? Hello, step-mom!

After the four tales are told, the tour guide laughs and congratulates them on how each person portrayed themselves as the VICTIM in their scenario, and in four short sequences shows the TRUE outcome of their stories . . . that's when the protagonists realize that they are all dead, and this house is their own personal hell.

Don't get me wrong, this movie will never win an Oscar, but it is a very fun B-movie anthology of horror stories that combine titillation with terror pretty effectively.

I leave this review with two words.

Vampire boobs.