Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear (2013)

After watching this a few years back, I didn't think too much of it. I remember liking the last section, Listen, with the music that makes people go crazy. On the strength of that segment, I decided to pick up a Blu-ray on sale.After rewatching the movie - out of order - I realized it's actually better than I gave it credit for.There are five segments. There's actually a thread connecting all of them. I checked the other reviews here, and it doesn't seem like any of them noticed this.The corporation that is centered on in the fourth segment has tentacles in all of the other stories. It also sets up the fifth segment.All of the stories have something to offer. They aren't especially scary, but at the least, they are interesting. The only one that suffers is the Sight segment, which seems like an interesting idea, but the execution is a bit confusing.

Chilling Visions has five stories based on the five senses.Smell. A mysterious but cheery sales lady appears at the door of some divorced loser and gives him a spray bottle of pheromones that will make him successful. It works but it also rots his skin where applied. He ends up dead and drops from his corpse are used to make more spray bottles.Sight. An ophthalmologist extracts some visual energy from his patients during eye exams and distills into drops that he then applies to his own eyes to see things his patients saw. He keeps dozens of bottles. When a pretty patient shows up beaten he asks her to send her abusive boyfriend. And with him he applied some mist to his eyes that drives him crazy. Violence between the two ensue.Touch. A family has a car accident out in the woods. The blind kid goes searching for help. He discovers the car was disabled due to a trap. He walks around, finds more traps, then a house where victims are who tell him of a villain who doesn't like to be touched. The kid leaves and runs into the crazy guy, who's also the boyfriend from the previous episode. But the kid is resourceful.Taste. A guy is taken in a limo to some corporation. He doesn't know where or why. Everyone acts weird. When he meets his appointment she offers him a job and warns him that if he refuses he'll be in some unspecified trouble. The job consists of him searching for and reassembling a song, a song that is said to kill the listeners. He refuses. The chick attacks him.Listen. Two video/sound techs and a camera girl receive some tapes about a Russian guy who composed a song that kills people who listen to it. The tapes involve a researcher in the past who's trying to get someone to play the song. They keep getting more tapes and time markers to reconstruct the whole thing. They succeed. In the tape everyone who plays the song gets sick. No one can finish it. Until the researcher destroys one player's ears. He plays the whole song and everyone in the room kill themselves. The two guys are afraid. The camera girl secretly uploads the song online.Chilling Visions has some good ideas and is somewhat original. But it just doesn't know how to effectively bring those ideas to screen. The first episode is filmed like a silly comedy complete with goofy and romantic music. The second episode wastes an intriguing idea and ends leaving you nowhere. The third episode has a good performance by the actor who plays the kid, it doesn't have any ideas but I guess is supposed to support the second story. The fourth is over the top and makes no sense but prepares you for #5 and gives you some background to the others. You see, in all of them there's hints of a corporation that is behind it all. Behind what? I guess in the end behind the attempt to kill everyone. The final episode is filmed in parts in POV style, plus the black and white footage of the researcher, but despite the style doesn't capture what should be pretty creepy. Overall, it would have been better had they worked out the purpose of the corporation a bit more. Or a bit less, it could have been like a surprise twist. Even though the stories are long enough, you can't really connect with any of the characters and that is a fatal flaw when you have stories that you don't know where they'll lead you.

An anthology series about the five senses all interlocked together.The Good Story-Touch. Stranded in the forest after a car accident, a blind boy tries to find his way to help only to stumble across a serial killer's secret hideout. Unable to get away, he has to rely on his instincts to get away. While there wasn't a whole lot to really like here, as the ingenuity of the boy having to use his other senses to outwit the madman is negated by the twist ending of requiring him to survive anyway, it really saps the entry of it's potential as the forest setting works nicely and the scenes of him wandering around finding the area is pretty chilling. As well, it doesn't really use it's targeted sense all that well so it has some problems but remains the best of the episodes.The Bad Stor(ies)-Smell. Unlucky in life, a man receives a mysterious bottle of perfume from a strange woman and soon begins a run of good fortune. However, he soon begins to realize there's dangerous side- effects to the strange accessory. While on the surface this had some potentially intriguing ideas about the destruction of the human body and how those around us will forgo physical attraction over material wealth, the fact that these are downplayed so significantly in favor of a tired rehashing a romance between separated lovers makes this one feel much longer than it really is. In addition, the fact that this one never really plays up the fact that the perfume makes all the difference and it never exploits how it smells to others is a real lost art, meaning this one is really only watchable for the make-up effects on the decomposing body.Sight-Troubled by his loneliness, an optometrist uses his machines to extract his patient's memories and use them to experience their life. When he inadvertently triggers a homicidal man into a killing spree, he finds himself on the killer's list. Frankly, this could've been something as it really plays on a true fear for once, in that the strange machines at the doctor's office do more than help us, and the stalking in the abandoned office late at night really get quite chilling at times, but this one is just way too short to mean anything. It's got all the ingredients it needs to be creepy and chilling, except length for everything is over far too quickly and it never really uses the sight angle at all as the whole stolen-memories angle is used to experience their lives, not to fix his ailing sight and the process for stealing memories is happened-upon, which could've made this work more than it does. It's the closest to going up, but it stays down here.Taste-Heading into an office for an interview, a man finds the agency who called him in to be quite unusual and strange. When he rejects their offer, he finds himself stalked through the hallways by the executive who has a strange habit of eating the ungrateful. Quite simply, this was the lamest entry in the series. The main point here is that it has no connection to it's chosen sense, and features a man running away from a woman with a strange contraption on her head that lets her devour human flesh. It doesn't have any time devoted to it and really seems to be there simply to interconnect all the different story lines together since that's how we know they belong together, but it doesn't do anything with them and feels so lame and unrealistic the image of the contraption is wasted by all the negative elements around it.Hearing-Attempting to fix a documentary, a film crew finds their subject is an insane music composer who crafted a tune that made people commit suicide. Unaware of the dangers of their assignment, they soon realize the deadly powers of the song and try to stop it from spreading. Another one that had potential with a pretty creepy set-up and a rather innovative approach to a clichéd subject, but instead the insistence of this one to appear as a found-footage piece severely diminishes it's impact. The shaking footage and tons of obscure shots really do this one in, and when the horror finally hits home it's in the last few minutes since all they do is argue with each other over how to edit the piece together and then flashes of the song that they're working on. A great concept, horrible execution.Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, Brief Nudity and drug use.

Saw this at the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival last night. This is a very cool concept for an anthology film. There are five segments, each one representing a different one of the five senses. I thought all of the shorts had a very unique "voice." Each segment had an unexpected take on the sense that was portrayed. I enjoyed the look of the films. We were told that Claudio Rietti shot most of the segments. The only segment that looked "different" was the "HEARING" segment, but that's because it was found footage, so it worked. Surprisingly, each story had a very different tone, which was cool.A few notes on each segment (MINOR SPOILERS): SMELL: Had a bit of dark humor throughout. The director said he was inspired by Tales From the Crypt, and it felt like a lost episode of that show. This was a pretty intricate story with a lot of cool elements. Mixed funny/gross/dramatic in a fun and weird way. Great music. The director and the main actors from this segment were there for a Q&A afterward. Fun to hear them talk about doing the gore effects.SIGHT: I enjoyed the performance of the "evil boyfriend." This segment also had some cool "vision effects." I felt the ending was predictable. However, the concept was very original. Cool sound design.TOUCH: Great performance by the little boy. The villain is the same actor as the "evil boyfriend" in SIGHT. Not sure if it was supposed to be the same character? That was a little confusing. Overall, though, cool story with good tension throughout. Cool camera work and "blind POV" shots.TASTE: This one looked really cool. Neat location, interesting setup. Drags a bit in the middle. I was antsy waiting for what was going to happen. The main character is going to an interview at a strange corporation. We see characters from the other segments that presumably work for this evil corporation, but that's not explained very well. Cool, bloody ending.LISTEN: Nice play on the found footage concept. Felt sort of like a horror version of the Dharma Initiative tapes from Lost. Good chemistry between the two leads. The ending felt rushed or poorly executed and didn't quite work for me. But it was great until the finale.After the five segments, the film just ends. I was disappointed with the ending. We never get any explanation of how these shorts are tied together. We see characters from all the shorts appear at the evil corporation in the TASTE segment. Also, we hear about the "Watershed" company. But, it's never really explained how the characters or worlds fit together or what the intent of the evil corporation is. I would have loved one last little segment at the end to sort of wrap it all up and give us some answers.Overall, I think it was a solid effort by everyone involved. We were told that each segment had only 4 days to shoot and a very tight budget. Considering those facts, the quality is EXTREMELY impressive. There aren't that many "scares" in the movie. Horrific things happen, but overall it's more suspense/thriller with some gross-out gore moments. I think SMELL and LISTEN stood out the most, maybe because they were first and last and had the longest running times. However, I really liked all the segments. Most anthology films have one or two good segments, but every segment in this film had an interesting story, good characters, and great production value. Also, I'm glad I got to see this on the big screen with an audience. It was a crowd-pleaser.NOTE: 5 Senses of Fear was produced for the Chiller Network. I never watch that channel, because it's not HD, but I might make an exception to watch this again on May 31st.