Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.5

Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 23, 2013

A standup comedian I saw recently brought down the house when she was recounting a bizarre incident she witnessed in New York involving a driverless UPS truck rolling down a crowded Manhattan street. “It was like something out of a movie,” the woman said, then added (to raucous laughter), “well, more like a student film.” She may in fact have been thinking of Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear, a portmanteau of sorts done by some young filmmakers. This set of five horror outings is built on the conceit of each film exploiting one of the five senses. As with most anthology films, this one has its relative successes and failures. There’s a halting attempt to bind together at least a few of the outings with little winking references to some of the other films in the set, but in reality each of these short features can pretty much stand (or fall, as the case may be) on its own. While each of them has at least something to recommend it, overall this is a somewhat lackluster outing, and in fact at least some viewers will be more creeped out by the introductory prelude, which shows a chained main having his various sensory portals sewn shut, than they will by anything in any of these films.

The five shorts are:

Smell. This plays like a predictable but decently enjoyable episode of The Twilight Zone (or perhaps more appropriately Night Gallery). Sad sack Seth Kyle (Corey Scott Rutledge) is a loser who is stuck in a dead end job and who is attempting to recover from a recent divorce. One morning he’s awakened by an almost scarily cheery saleswoman type named Miss Margaret (Hilary Greer) at his door, informing him that all of his problems can be traced to his lack of appropriate pheromones. She presents him with a bright blue cologne bottle and tells him it’s a free sample, but to use the product carefully and to call her if there are any unexpected side effects. Seth of course sprays on a bit of the cologne and almost instantly finds himself the object of unbridled female attention as well as the unexpected recipient of a cushy promotion at work. Unfortunately everywhere he sprays the cologne starts rotting away, until he begins to resemble a character out of The Walking Dead. This short does have the benefit of a rather dark sense of humor going for it, but ultimately it’s fairly rote and doesn’t provide many chills other than a bit of “gross out factor” once Seth starts decomposing.

See. This short has an interesting premise, where an elderly ophthalmologist named Dr. Tom (Ted Yudain) has invented a device that sucks the memories of things seen out of various patients’ eyes, which the good (?) doctor is able to then distill into eye drops which he dollops on his own orbs, allowing him to revisit those visions. In doing so, he discovers that one of his patients is being abused by her boyfriend, and he sets out to teach the guy a lesson he won’t soon forget. What happens next is a violent and fairly disturbing turning of the tables. While this is perhaps the best directed of the shorts (Miko Hughes, who appeared in Pet Sematary: Remains, helmed the short), it doesn’t really capitalize very well on the intriguing premise and instead relies on the admittedly disturbing image of various sharp objects being poked into eye sockets to achieve whatever fear factor it does.

Touch. I personally found this one of the more interesting shorts in this collection, although a major spoiler is posted on the back cover description, so don’t read that first if you get this and want a rather nice little reveal to remain fresh. Without ruining what is this short’s central conceit, let’s just say that putting this under the “touch” category might be at least slightly misleading, and perhaps intentionally so. This involves the adventures of a little boy who is involved in a devastating car accident with his parents on an isolated road out in the country and who must try to go get help for them all. He of course runs into a demented killer along the way, and a cat and mouse game ensues. But underlying all of this is the short’s rather nice little surprise (which truth be told has been utilized in all sorts of previous films, but which is handled here rather well).

Taste. Gore fiends are probably going to love this short, but I found it too odd and underdeveloped to really resonate, despite a really graphic and gross finale that sees one character basically get reduced to snack food. A hipster hacker named Aaron (Doug Roland) arrives at an ultra modern high rise in a chauffeured limousine, unaware of why he’s been summoned to this tony locale. He’s informed that someone named Lacey (Symba Smith) will see him soon, and as he waits, he tries to ferret out information from a gaggle of really odd other people who are sitting around in the office’s lobby. Once Aaron and Lacey retire to a conference room for an interview of sorts, things get bizarre in a big hurry. This is one of the shorts which outright references another (in this case Listen), but which never gives the viewer enough information to really connect with the main character. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything that happens here. Lovers of on screen blood and guts will get their fill, but there’s no real story here supporting the mayhem.

Listen. This is a “found footage” outing, interspersed with supposedly contemporary first person confessionals by a film crew who have been investigating an urban legend surrounding a “killer song” that is able to morph otherwise rational people into marauding maniacs. There’s a kind of creepy ambience to some of the supposed archival footage, in grainy and damaged black and white, but this is a pretty lame attempt at generating scares from a guy playing the piano. Now if he had been playing a song by One Direction, that would have been frightening—at least to some of us.

Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. There are a variety of different looks to these five shorts, with some of them (like See) featuring more or less accurate looking color (aside from some of the "visions" that have been distressed or otherwise processed in post), while others, notably Listen, feature a retro black and white video look, at least some of the time. Most of these shorts do feature some fairly aggressive color grading and a couple of them also feature liberally tweaked fantasy or memory sequences. Generally speaking, the image quality here is quite sharp and well defined, with very good fine detail. Noise occasionally spikes just slightly in darker sequences (most notably in Touch when the little boy ventures into some dimly lit environments), but otherwise this is a solid looking presentation.

Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear features lossless DTS-HD Master Audio mixes in both 5.1 and 2.0. As with the video quality, surround activity is somewhat variable throughout the five features included in this anthology. Smell, for example, only has some passing immersion, while the outdoor environments of Touch offer quite a bit more ambient environmental noise. Fidelity is excellent throughout all five shorts, with dialogue and sound effects reproduced very cleanly and accurately. Dynamic range is quite wide if taken over the range of all five entries.

Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scene (1080p; 00:55) comes from the Smell short.


• Teasers and Trailers (1080p; 3:26)

Chilling Visions: 5 Senses of Fear Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Chiller TV is to be commended for offering young filmmakers the chance to indulge their whims in a portmanteau like this one, but as should probably be expected, there's a wide variance in scares and baseline quality here. The conceit is rather interesting, but I'm still wondering what's going on with that poor hapless guy who's being sewn up to within an inch of his life in the opening scenes. That's not necessarily good news for the five shorts that follow.