Horror Movie Review: Fun Size Horror: Volume 1 (2015)

A collection of 21 shorts all dealing with a wide array of subjects, Fun Size Horror is a bit like a comedy sketch show…hit & miss.

Bite-sized scares lasting between 2-5 minutes long without a bookend story as you often find in anthologies. Lacking context the collection is a bit of a mess to watch with some of the offerings being laughably poor. Thankfully even those ones are over before they become too much to bear.

For every bad story though there is an equally great one told with buckets of imagination thrown in. All manner of ideas are tried out here & does seem to suggest an attempt to throw everything at the wall & see what sticks.

Wth each story dealing with different subjects the scares tend to come from your own personal feelings about what is being shown. For example the episode called Mother was easily the most terrifying in the collection for me. A heavily pregnant woman goes for a scan & is shocked to see that her womb is filled with spiders. I fucking hate spiders so this was incredibly uncomfortable for me to watch.

Some of the other ones that were quite effective included:

Knock, Knock: The old monster in the closet story told really well with effective creepy scares.
Happy Birthday: A story about the madness of suburbia as we witness a young girls sick & twisted birthday party.
Mr. Hendrix: Similar to the Knock Knock episode but dealing with it from an adult perspective.
Bitter: Goes straight down the comedic route as we see a group of lazy magic users attack each other with amusing results.
A Dog & His Boy: A man is unlucky in love, never seeming to get a second date. Basically Psycho with a dog replacing Norman Bates.

Sadly there are just as many that are ineffective, boring & stupid. The worst story within the collection is probably ‘Bad Egg’ that uses hand puppets to tell its short story. It’s pretty damn awful & wouldn’t look out of place on YouTube.

Some of the other bad ones include:

Evil Voices Lie: We watch someone watching a poorly recorded tape of a willing abductee. Just awful.
Trust: Two young boys play chicken with all manner of tools. It goes wrong. That’s it.
The Creepy Fucking Kid in Apartment B: Interesting title, awful delivery as it manages to spoil its own surprise ending.
The Screaming: Only just going over 15 seconds & you’ll be left scratching your head wondering just what was the point of it.

The thing about Fun Size Horror is that the ones that are good are really good but the ones that are bad are really bad. There are plenty in between that just don’t live long in the memory. It’s an admirable effort with some exciting ideas, good visual effects (in most, not all) & decent acting (bar one or two horror shows).