I'm a sucker for horror anthologies. No matter how low their budgets, how lousy their acting or how ludicrous their plots, they always get into my head and stay there. Maybe its because their stories are so short; a 20 minute segment has more freedom to abuse its characters (and its audience) than a 90 minute feature does, simply because we haven't invested as much emotional energy into the story. It's rare that a bunch of people we've known and loved for an hour and a half all end up dead, but we'll tune in to Tales from the Crypt just to see this week's scumbag get his or her comeuppance. The ontological hazard of the horror anthology, though, is that the quality of its stories varies within any given film--sometimes wildly. And in Red Midnight, this hazard comes out in full force.

Red Midnight is a production of Cinema Image, the folks who brought us 5 Dead on the Crimson Canvas and Machines of Love and Hate. It begins in a taxicab with a reporter named Karen Marks (Christine Bonfanti), who's anxious to get to the Red Midnight theater....not because she wants to see the show, but because she's on assignment and will be in big trouble if she misses her deadline. Karen is the sort of person we see in supernaturally-themed movies like this, a self-centered skeptic who eventually learns that there is more to truth than logic. She's going to see a psychic (Patrick J. Egan) who picks out members of his audience and "reads" them, John Edwards-style. And the three stories he tells are the tales that make up the bulk of the movie. I'm not sure if they're predictions for the future or some kind of auditory chain letter ("These people didn't listen to me and look what happened to them"), but it doesn't matter.

What matters is that the stories are good--different, maybe, or scary or fun--and sadly, the first story is none of these things. In "Anathema" a young man (Roger Woo) has moved into a new house. His name is John Kitano, and though he's still grieving for his dead wife and child, a friend urges him to sign up with an Internet dating service. Unfortunately John is already taken...by the ghost who lives in the house.

It doesn't take long to realize that "Anathema" is writer/director Ray Schweitz's homage to Asian horror films. The ghost (Jasi Cotton Lanier) has long, black hair--just like The Ring's videotape-cursing Somara and the little boy's mother in The Grudge. In fact, there's so much homage going on that there's little room for anything original. "I was trying to do a little bit of Evil Dead here," Schweitz notes in his commentary as a ball of hair rolls across the floor and curls around John's wrist. "I got this from an Asian horror film called Pulse...I wanted the lighting in this apartment to remind you of Suspiria." Like Eli Roth's Cabin Fever, "Anathema" is burdened by its writer's own self-consciousness; all the visual footnotes crowd out the story. What's worse is that "Anathema" doesn't have time to waste. When you've got less than an hour to tell your story, why fill that time with someone else's?

"Anathema" is so frustrating because, honestly, there's some very good stuff buried here. At one point, John takes each of his potential Internet dates to a restaurant, one after the other. Schweitz has the actresses ad lib most of their lines, and they are hilarious. "Are you looking at my boobs?" snaps uber-bitch Tanya (Tara Magalski) for no reason at all. When John tells the librarian, Sarah (Michele Marie Traina), that he's ready to leave, she asks: "Does this mean we're not gonna fuck?"

Some of the effects are clever as well. While John contemplates himself in the bathroom mirror, the ghost appears behind him. She doesn't just stand in the shadows like Michael Meyers would have done, nor does she step into the frame. She grows into it like a time-lapsed beanstalk. This scene only takes a moment, but I've never seen an entrance quite like it.

But for every moment of growth in this segment, there are several minutes of things staying right where they are, right where we've seen them millions of times. The ghost climbs gecko-like over the hero while he's sleeping, and, at one point, crawls across the floor like Somara pulls herself out of a television. The end result is a short film that's not very scary...indeed, is not much of a film at all. What we have here is a list of other, better movies.

Thankfully, the second story is much better. Brian Michael Finn's "The Creation of Dr. Grecoz" is the shortest segment in the film, and also my favorite. It's about an eye surgeon (Hugh Daly) who, we slowly learn, is obsessed with his grown son Billy. When the boy is blinded and scarred in a fire, the doctor gives him new eyes. But Billy's new vision shows him painful truths: he sees how twisted and corrupt his father's love really is, while Dr. Grecoz is blind to his own selfishness. ("You didn't do this for me, Dad," cries Billy near the end of the film. "You did it for yourself.") The doctor's obsession isn't at all sexual--incest would be boring, frankly--but it's stifling and destructive nonetheless. The doctor keeps thousands of pictueres of Billy in a small room, and in them all he is a little boy. Like the killer in Maniac who nails women's scalps to mannequins, he wants to keep his son with him always. Billy is the creation of Dr. Grecoz: a fantasy child, a myth the doctor tells himself again and again and again. But the real Billy is alone. He's always been alone, because to his father he doesn't really exist. I wish this piece were a little longer, just so I could've had more time to probe the psychologies of these characters.

Red Midnight ends (almost) with "Pilgrimage," a mini giallo written and directed by Giovanni Piangiani. After his partner is found with a St. Peter's cross carved into his stomach, an FBI agent (played excellently by producer Joseph Zazo) travels to Rome to investigate. He finds a Satanist sacrificing a nun to raise Lucifer from Hell....and the Satanist finds more than he bargained for in the FBI agent.

For some reason, the Satanist (Maurizio Rapotec) made me think of Sigourney Weaver's art teacher in Ghostbusters II--you know, the little weasel who brings Vigo the Carpathian to life and indirectly encases New York in bubblegum ooze. This association isn't completely out-of-bounds: both men are cowards who mess around with forces they don't understand and find out too late that they're not the ones calling the shots. But it was still strange to hear "The Master" go on about demonic rape and try not to laugh.

As uneven as Red Midnight is, I can't fault Cinema Image for its presentation. Shot on digital video, the movie image has both clarity and a documentary feel. Extras include filmmakers' commentaries--with the directors of each film--still galleries, trailers for other Cinema Image productions, and interviews. The movie may be low budget, but it's presented like a million bucks.

I wouldn't have paid $15 for Red Midnight--it has too many valleys and its peaks aren't high enough for me. But even at its worst, there are glimmers of goodness. I might even try another Cinema Image film again (Guilty Pleasures looks intriguing), but probably not anytime soon.