From the producers of The Gallows, SCREAMBOX Exclusive Night of the Missing streams on November 28. The horror anthology features genre favorites Bill Moseley (The Devil’s Rejects) and Jenna Kanell (Terrifier).

Anthology movies are often quite fun!

Horror anthologies usually remind me of Trick R Treat, the cult classic antho from the late 00’s starring Brian Cox, Anna Paquin, and others. It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen credibly referred to as both underrated and overrated. Underrated because it’s underseen by folks at large and is only really known to horror aficionados. Overrated because the people that like it treat it like it should be a Halloween classic and everyone should adore it every single Spooky Season.

I’ll confess to being a big fan of the film. I am among those that have probably seen it a few too many times, and I’m sure I’ll see it several more in my life. It’s not an EVERY Halloween outing in my household, but once every two or three times the holiday comes around? Heck yeah.

There’s also the dual-themed A Christmas Horror Story, an obviously Yuletide-ified horror antho from 2015 with a slew of stories taking place in a cursed town called Bailey Downs. I saw this one for the first time last year and became a fan of it, as well. I watched it twice within a month so I could show my wife after I’d seen it.

The Night Of The Missing (seemingly A.K.A. Nightmare At Precinct 84 if Letterboxd is to be believed), is a new addition to the horror anthology genre. It’s core through-story is of a strange woman coming into a police precinct to report a missing person. But before she can tell her story to the sheriff, she gets caught up in the myriad of missing posters the town has for its residence. The woman then begins telling the sheriff the unbelievable tale of each missing person.

Over the course of the next 85 minutes, we get four stories layered overtop the goings-on of the sheriff and her visitor, each with varying degrees of weirdness and supernatural elements as to how the victims have gone missing for so long.

And by the end, we find out more about the two women in the precinct and how they came together.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+The first and fourth of the anthology stories are both quite good, and wildly different. The first is a relatively short story about a missing boy trying valiantly to spoil his dinner when he hears an ice cream truck outside. The story is to-the-point and incredibly creepy and off-putting. I’m not largely a jump-scare person, but this bit had two quite effective ones.

The fourth tale is of a husband determined to do anything for his wife to help her get her dream home. So he gets into selling drugs, like one does. When he doesn’t have the money on time, the men he got the supply from kill his wife. He is then under house arrest and starts to believe her ghost is haunting him. And then… the men who killed her show back up.

Both of these stories are well told, make sense, and work as brief tales. I was really impressed with both.

+For a film that can’t have had much of a budget, it looks quite good. High quality footage, good sound. It’s all pretty well-made. There are some effects that ruin the day a bit here (a ghost stabbing someone in the head is almost laughably bad at one point), but by-and-large, the director (Samuel Gonzalez Jr) used good looking sets, has an eye for cinematography, and kept everything constrained within his means.

-As opposed to the first and fourth stories, the second and third are not particularly solid. They are each a bit whacky, and they don’t really make any sense. The second is about a work-from-home phone sex operator who gets the feeling her client is watching her. The third is of a girl (and the girl from the story #2, though that is never explained how she got there) stuck inside a miniature layout of a town.

They are both just a little too absurds and out in left field for me, and they don’t blend well with the better told (and more straight-forward) first and fourth arcs.

-The acting across the board here is fairly underwhelming. It gets a bit better as the movie goes on–again, look to the fourth story about the drug dealers where the whole movie picked up, and the acting was also a little bit better there–but for some stretches, it’s not particularly high quality at all. Weirdly delivered lines, bad dialogue that isn’t helping the actors at all, questionable body language choices… it just doesn’t feel natural or organic whatsoever.

OVERALL

It’s unbalanced, and even though 50% of the anthology arcs are good, the other half are little more than nonsense. And the through-story isn’t anything to write home about either. The acting really hurts this, as well, as the characters are so often not that believable. It’s visually acceptable, but even for an anthology fan like myself, I can’t really recommend giving this a try.