2 out of 5

Director: Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Adam Rifkin, Tim Sullivan

Anthology movies are a mixed bag. They can spawn something fresh and smart – Trick R Treat – or can just fun thanks to their short-attention span nature – e.g. Creepshow. But sequencing is key. Chillerama is pretty much killed by its sequencing, the second short in the film – “I Was a Teenage Werebear” – ruining any chance of the audience coming out of a cloud of boredom and disappointment. I get it, its tough when you have different directors under one roof. The four guys in this movie – Adam Rifkin (who does the 50s atomic-monster movie spoof “Wadzilla”), Tim Sullivan (the Beach Blanket Bingo gay-camp “Werebear”), Adam Green (“The Diary of Anne Frankenstein”) and Joe Lynch (the linking zombie story surrounding the short films) all know each other through degrees of separation, and have worked around the horror genre in various capacities. It’s good that they each chose a specific style for their elements and the linking story – the local drive-in is shutting down and is showing some lost classics to commemorate the occasion… interrupted by a zombie plague full of sex-addicted zombies – the story works on the B-movie level, and promises some sicko goop and gore payoff. Things start off well with Wadzilla, but it pretty much goes for broke in terms of cameos and pervy humor, which sets a high B-bar for the next pieces to pass. And Adam Green’s Frankenstein parody is hilarious, but it cant swing the viewer out of the doldrums of “Werebear,” which picks a good genre to gay-up, but plays like an inept one-note gag for 20 minutes too long. It could’ve been tolerable as an opening number, but with the sequencing as is, you wonder how they let this short into the show. By when we return to our linking story, everything has a taint of boredom to it, adding our moderately compelling drive-in story to the pile of “just move it along.” Thus the remainder of the film feels like too little too late. Too bad.