I've been getting into older horror movies a bit more recently, and a bit ago, I came across this movie which stars Karen Black in all three stories who I easily recalled as Mama Firefly from House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. I thought she was creepy as fuck in those movies and low and behold....she didn't gain that talent late in life, Karen Black is delightfully unsettling in all three stories.
Trilogy of Terror is broken into 3 stories all of which have Black as the main lead. In the first story, she plays an innocent teacher named Julie, who is drugged and blackmailed by a malicious student. But low and behold, she isn't nearly as innocent as she looks. In the second story, she plays Millicent Larimore, a woman dedicated to murdering her heartless hoe of a sister named Therese. And in the third story, she plays Amelia, a very passive and weak woman who buys a tiki doll for her boyfriend, and as expected...this tiki doll is quite deadly.
Considering Black is the main character in all three stories and not a ton of energy is dedicated to other characters, a lot of the movie's potential to fail/succeed does rest on her shoulders...and luckily, she carries it off well. Though the 3 different characters all have some similiarites linking their personas together, they also have some differences that Black pulls off rather well. And she's fucking creepy in all three. Hat's off to her.
None of these stories are very scary (in fact, they have the tendencies to resemble moderately creepy campfire stories as opposed to plots ina movie), but there are a couple of pretty cool moments and it was a pretty intelligent idea to make the movie short, with 3 stories, making it pretty hard for the movie's 3 segments to overstay their welcome. It's not a movie that will chill you to the bone, but it's pretty fun to watch and in terms of how the story moves, it's what Goldilocks would describe as, "just right".
3/4
