the audience applauded

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Did you people see the same film I saw?

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Flavor Flav brings to you two stories of urban horror. Karma: A group of bank robbers cause a bloodbath during a bank job, which results in the deaths of a few people & ends up with one of their number badly injured. Fleeing the scene, their stolen car breaks down in the woods. After disposing of their injured mate, the robbers come across a house where the owners let them use the phone to call for help. But what the robbers don't know is that the house's owners & the citizens of the town they had robbed are also a vigilante cannibal cult – and that they plan to get revenge for their dead friends. Storm: A group of friends are waiting out a fierce storm in their parents' house. After playing (and getting spooked by) a game of Bloody Mary, they encounter a visit from a creepy-looking clown who claims to want to use their phone. As soon as he comes in, the friends don't entirely trust him. But when a cop also shows up claiming to be hunting a psychopath who impersonates people, the murders begin to occur. Who is killing the group – the clown, the cop or a mysterious supernatural presence? I have never been much of a fan of hip-hop-related genre films. The hip-hop industry has been responsible for warping the minds of many youngsters who believe that it is desirable to go around pimping, selling & using drugs, robbing banks, endlessly swearing or conducting drive-bys. Not to mention that the 'music' these hip-hop artists make is heavily clichéd, unoriginal & offensive to anyone with a decent brain (although to be fair, Tupac Shakur & Eminem were different from those others by having good lyrics & clean living messages). As for the films made by this industry, most of them follow the same crap that the songs generate, luring more innocent minds to follow this dark & twisted path.Nite Tales: The Movie is an attempt to make a gangsta rap version of the anthology film (a film which is divided into several short films with a common theme). Picked for the hosting duties is Flavor Flav, a former rapper who has traded in his dignity for an oversized pendant clock, a cocky personality & the ability to make a piano squeal like the proverbial pig. He also doesn't know that the film he is hosting is not the world's first two-films-in-one package (or the script hasn't made that clear to him at all). He also tries some asinine rhyming slang – "From coast to coast / we eat pot roast" – and effectively insults the viewer's intelligence to the point that your brain starts to hurt. Flav might be better off as a cartoon character in the children's animation Yoo-Hoo & Friends but as a serious horror host, Flav is complete rubbish.As for the stories, both have similar themes revolving around strangers entering houses in order to use the telephone but clearly having an agenda. Karma is an unconvincing tale of a group of bank robbers who find themselves in serious trouble when they end up in a house where the town's residents reveal themselves to be vigilante cannibals who then offer the robbers a deal – they will only allow one of them to live – but renege on it when they find out that the robber the gang apparently shot dead is still alive & gone with the loot. The story is clichéd & clearly something that only a rap producer might have thought up, although as a believer of karma, I found the story's (inadvertent, it seems) message that crime will lead you to Hell appropriate. The revelation that the injured robber is still alive & escapes with the loot is quite weak. As for Storm, the film improves slightly. The story of a group of young friends who receive a fatal shock when their little game of "Bloody Mary" causes some trouble to occur with a creepy clown & a cop who are hunting each other arriving at the house to find shelter from the storm. Despite an unconvincing first half, Storm manages to gain some ground in the game that the clown & the cop play with each other while the young adults in the house begin to wind up dead, although the kills end up being ruined by the use of cheap stylistic effects that don't reveal the actual kill until the body is found by the others later (one thing I found to be rather ironic in the case of Storm is that it stars Tony Todd – the Candyman himself – who plays the clown & who finds to his chagrin that the Bloody Mary game has caused a real killer ghost to come into our world). The punchline is, like Karma, rather weak.To be honest, I wasn't much of a fan of either story. Karma was nothing but cliché while Storm had some potential to elevate the whole sorry mess into functional mediocrity but failed because it was a poor mix of slasher film & Candyman knockoff (given the fact that Tony Todd appeared in it). In the end, I found Nite Tales: The Movie to be utter rubbish although the gangsta rap crowd might find it amusing.

This was at least as good as a couple episodes of "Are You Afraid of the Dark?". Not bad. Not excellent, but not bad. Oddly entertaining was the baffling and near-incomprehensible screen time with Flavor Flav "hosting" at the beginning and end, which seemed to be just rambling that essentially amounted to repetitions of "This is a movie. Know what I'm sayin'?" The second story was a lot stronger than the first. There really wasn't much to the first, aside from the twist of who they run into. The second story had enough interest to keep you guessing for a bit. Bonus points for Tony Todd in the cast.

Nite Tales: The Movie starts as our host Flavor Flav introduces one of two stories...First up is 'Karma' where four gangsters rob a bank in small town, expected to be an easy score an old security guard shoots one of the robbers. Later that night while driving back to the city the robbers car breaks down, noticing a farmhouse in the distance they decide to go there & steal their car. However the residents have other ideas & the robbers find that leaving the farmhouse in one piece is not going to easy...Next up is 'Storm' where five teenage friends are having fun at home during a torrential thunderstorm, then a mysterious man dressed as clown knocks on the door asking for help. They let him in & a stranded cop follows shortly after & that's when the killings start...Co-written, executive produced & directed by Deon Taylor this wasn't as bad as I had expected but it's hardly amazing, presumably a spin-off from the TV series Nite Tales: The Series (2009) this contains only two forty odd minute horror stories as opposed the usual three or four twenty minute stories that horror anthologies go for. The first story Karma is pretty much your average backwoods brutality horror film told in about half the usual running time, city folk are stuck in some isolated woods somewhere & fall prey to the sadistic inbred cannibalistic locals. There's no real twist here or many surprises & it just plays like a straight forty minute horror film, the character's are alright but the mysterious car breakdown is never explained & it's never explained when the cannibals want their money back why they don't just check the car as that would surely have been the logical place where it would be. Overall not too bad at all. The second story Storm goes more for twists & turns than visceral horror as a killer is loose during a vicious thunderstorm, the only question is who is it? Is it the creepy clown or the cop or maybe someone else? There are one or two problems with this like when Cindy is killed both the cop & clown are downstairs together & so couldn't have done it, I'm surprised no-one picked up on this & why, if he is a cop, did James dress like a clown? There's never any explanation given, do all undercover cops dress like clowns? Overall this one felt like a whodunit with slight horror overtones & the suspense & tension are built up quite well.There's no real linking wraparound story, we just get this Flavor Flav geezer trying to be cool, he fails. There's a bit of gore here, there's some flesh ripping & eating, a few people get shot & there are a couple of gory blood spurting slashed throats. The make-up effects are pretty good & Tony Todd in full creepy clown make-up & costume is unnerving. There's plenty of swearing but no nudity. This is surprisingly well made with nice photography that thankfully never overdoes the shaky or twitchy style & the use of fast editing is kept to a minimum. I mean it just looks like a proper film. The story Storm has a decent atmosphere being set at night during a thunderstorm & it feels like a horror film should.With a supposed budget of about $450,000 I am surprised at how good this looks, the production values are decent & it's certainly better made than a lot of low budget horror junk out there even if it's not exactly brilliant in terms of story. The acting is alright with Sticky Fingaz & genre favourite Tony Todd the names.Nite Tales: The Movie isn't brilliant at all, the stories lack real punch & a real memorable twist but they are well made & feel more like little horror films in their own right. Not the greatest but not the worst either, not a bad effort really.

Really, I am speechless. I will address each of the stories separately, but I will start by saying Flavor Flav almost ruins the entire movie by hosting it. He goes on and on about this movie being historic for being the first time you get 2 movies in one... Because, you know, the Horror Anthology genre doesn't exist. His rhymes are pretty stupid, and really all he did was make you feel dumb for watching it.Karma - If you watch horror movies, you have seen this done before. Same concept as House of 1000 corpses, but much less well done. Some gaping plot holes, and really no suspense buildup.Storm - If I had to choose, probably the better of the two. I actually quite liked the concept of trying to pick between the serial killer and bloody Mary. However, the producers rammed exactly what happened down your throats, and the story suffers for it. The moment of 'realization' at the end is pretty pointless considering the audience knows exactly what happened already. If you had been kept guessing on who the killer was, bloody Mary or the serial killer, this would have been far better.Then you get to see Flavor Flav again, and honestly I thought the epilogue couldn't have been any worse than the introduction... but it was.Overall, probably not worth your time. Gorehounds will get maybe a good 2 minutes of fun out of karma, the clown in storm looks kind of creepy, thats about all this movie has going for it.