Starring Renee Reres, Riley Roberts, Leonard Wu, Steve Wastell, Paula Ficara,

Directed by Tyger Torres

The first rule of Fright Club is that you do not watch Fright Club.

The second rule of Fright Club is that you do not watch Fright Club.

I violated the first two rules of Fright Club so I must accept whatever pain and suffering there was to follow because I brought it onto myself. And believe me, pain and suffering followed in spades.

Three ethnically diverse friends - Kassandra (generic Hispanic), Omar (a Will Smith doppelganger), and Dante (dorky Asian) - arrive at an art gallery that is rumored to be home to a Fright Club. What is a Fright Club? Well, the movie never actually gets into any specifics other than it is a super secretive, highly exclusive goth social club with branches all over the country. The goings-ons within these Fright Clubs have become the stuff of urban legend. It's Kassandra's birthday and the other two have managed to locate the supposed whereabouts of their neighborhood Fright Club. Why they want in is a mystery since there isn't anything about these three that gives off even the slightest fan that they're fans of the macabre. The tales they'll go onto tell will pretty much confirm this.

They enter the art gallery - every painting looks to have once been background fodder on an episode of Night Gallery - where the patrons inside all have the look of people taking a coffee break from a seriously hardcore session of playing live action Vampire: The Masquerade. The very out of place trio take notice of a painting on the wall of Fright Club's founder, the mysterious Sebastian Crowe. To me it looked like a comical oil painting of Diedrich Bader dressed like Dracula.

After telling the headmistress why they are there, the threesome are led downstairs past a bondage queen and her gimp into the lair of an unseen man concealed under an oversized Jedi cloak. The voice from beneath the cloak tells them that the only way to gain membership into Fright Club is to tell the scariest story they know. One by one, that's precisely what they do.

Yep, Fright Club is an anthology film composed of three shorts with the threesome looking to gain membership serving as the wraparounds. Each story has a different theme: werewolves, vampires, Frankenstein. Each tale is also tailored to a specific ethnicity. One tale is predominantly Hispanic, another predominanly black, and the last predominantly Asian. A pity none of the stories are predominantly worth a shit.

The first is Kassandra with her tale entitled Little Red Riding in the Hood. Things get off to a really bad start when it begins with an awkward dream sequence montage of suddenly grainy video footage. The quality of the footage will change several times throughout this particular tale. Basically, there's this Chicana who looks to be way too old to be playing Little Red Riding Hood looking to help out her sick, house-ridden Grandma. Her Gerardo look-a-like ex-boyfriend wants to get back together with her, but she refuses because she doesn't like the group he's started hanging with. His natural reaction is to put on a Universal Monsters' wolfman mask and pick up a shotgun. To Grandmother's house he go! My what big ears you have. No, not the ex-boyfriend in the werewolf mask, but the twist involving another character she meets up with along the way who turns out to be an actual werewolf. At least I think this person was supposed to be a werewolf. The pitiful, hairless, make-up job makes the transformation look less like a werewolf and more like Disney's Pinocchio after he started turning into a donkey. The only thing frightening about his boring, almost plotless waste of time is the knowledge that there's at least two more to go.

Next is Omar with The Boy The Cried Vamp, not to be confused with The Reviewer That Cried Uncle, which is about what I was ready to do by the time this one was barely halfway over. The tale kicks off with its main character, the supposedly young but not really looking all that young Jamal, being interrogated by the police over some murders he's accused of. Omar's story is told by Jamal, who tells the cops his tale in flashback. Think about that one for a moment. His tale flashbacks into an endless scene of Jamal and his girlfriend at a nightclub watching a stripper who never actually strips. Jamal is a DJ wannabe that believes his future lies in a new style of music he's developed, a blending of hip hop and goth that he call Goth Hop. If you're wondering what Goth Hop sounds like, just take a hip hop beat and give it a darker riff to it - hardly groundbreaking. Jamal's Bible-reading momma tells him he's wasting his life and refuses to give him the money he needs for a new turntable. Jamal decides to pay a visit to the eccentric nightclub owner who takes a liking to Jamal and his new style of music. If this nightclub owner wore some gold and gem-encrusted bling that says "VAMPIRE" it still wouldn't have made where this tale is any less obvious. I forget the character's name but I dubbed him "Urbanula". His paltry nightclub crew are like a BET version of those Vampire: The Masquerade players from the gallery. I was so hoping the Jamaican vampire would have sucked out someone's blood through his dreadlocks. How this awful tale plays out from there is made even worse than the previous tale because most of what happens in this one happens off camera, and even the flashbacks start having their own flashbacks.

Anthology films usually try and save the best tale for last. Fright Club saved the most terrible and most boring for last. That's really really saying something seeing as how the other two are already quite terrible and boring. Told by the nerdy Asian and entitled Spare Parts, this Frankenstein with chi tale deals with an even nerdier Asian, a scientist that has invented some sort of reanimation chip. Somebody dies, gets brought back to life, and bad things happen to those responsible for his death. The only thing this tale is about is 27 minutes too long. For the record, the segment is about 27 minutes long.

Now at the risk of spoiling the film's ending, if you didn't know what was going to happen from a mile away then you really are someone that needs their movie watching liscence revoked, the trio are denied admittence into Fright Club and get fed to a pack of ravenous demons under command of Sebastian Crowe. I have no arguement to this outcome. In fact, the producers of Fright Club should have reacted in much the same manner after being pitched this badly acted, horrendously written, pathetically directed, complete waste of time, energy, and money, and not just that of the people involved, but of my time, energy, and money too. Now if anyone starts a Tripe Club, I suspect writer-director Tyger Torres will be given full membership with honors.

Utterly pathetic crap from start to finish.

NO STARS