The tyranist's thoughts
A low-budget anthology piece that offers a random mixture of tales. The frame for the stories is a man seeking employment and being offered jobs that end in a horrible fashion. Not a bad idea, but I sometimes felt that the stories were only peripherally connected to the frame and in one of them, it even felt forced.
The first segment, entitled "Hit and Run" was both the hardest to watch and the creepiest. After an accidental hit and run, due to daydreaming, the dolls of the girl that was killed seek vengeance. And seek it, and seek it. This was one sort of long, but in reality it wasn't any longer than the others. The perception comes about because there is no dialogue in the entire story. Not one line. A little background noise/music and some evil doll whispering and that's it. It managed to be very effective, but felt drawn out the same way everyone thinks that 2001: A Space Odyssey is drawn out. The only other problem with this one was that it was hardly related to the frame at all. Being thrown out of the frame so early in the movie, makes it hard to buy into it the rest of the time.
Story two, "I Ain't Got No Body," picks up in a bookstore where a clerk apparently lusts daily after a particular customer. I can identify with this. Eventually, he discovers a book on astral travel and does what any red-blooded young man would do. Well, he crosses the well-defined rules of the astral plane and you can imagine what happens. This one was okay, but it lacked a coherent story. It was more like a short voyeuritic experiment. I guess it's the resolution of the story that really let me down.
Last of all is "The Death of . . ." which was probably the best scripted and most well-thought out of the stories. A struggling writer has written a script that is widely considered not worth the paper he printed it on. Depressed and loaded with intoxicants of various flavors, he says mean things to his girlfriend and she leaves him. Later that night Edgar Allan Poe, one of the depressed writer's favorite authors, appears and the fun ensues. This one turns out pretty effectively too. While it lacks any real scares, it is an interesting story and easily the best of the bunch.
Cheaply made and proud of it, the whole anthology is worth checking out. There is enough original material to be interesting and if you aren't opposed to low-grade effects and a lack of refinement, you may really dig on this one. Outside of the frame (or would that be inside?) this is one is definitely above the average anthology.

Rish's Reviews
Because I once dreamed of being a filmmaker, and tried my hand at no-budget moviemaking, I have a special place in my heart for the ultra-cheap independent film. I can watch stuff like this (and Carnival of Souls and The Blair Witch Project and Werewolf Tales) and try to appreciate the story being told, the style that can be found from time to time, and root for filmmakers to succeed against tremendous odds. And many times, they don't succeed ( Party Crasher, for instance, or The Evilmaker). Scary Tales falls somewhere in the middle.
Because these no-budget videos can't thrill with expensive effects, locations, or stars, the thing they depend on is a good script. This script wasn't great, but it had some nice ideas. The tales, though, despite the title, just weren't scary. In fact, I found some of the comedic moments more effective than the scary ones. For example, in between the stories, the job guy begins telling about another job and they show our hero as a janitor, putting on gloves to scrub a toilet. The hero interrupts the story with "Wait a minute, that job sounds terrible!" And they begin with a different one.
Parts of it were stupid, yes. But hey, a few parts (the doll whispers, the twists at the end of the second two stories, and the wraparound idea) were good. The blonde in the third story was really hot. The star of the piece (co-writer Bill Cassinelli) was actually pretty good, with a sort of dull likability that I could relate to. One of the gore effects worked really well (in the first story), and I had been waiting so damn long when it happened that I actually cheered. The pace, in that tale and overall, was very very slow. Too bad they couldn't have fit a fourth story into the same amount of time.