Woohoo! Anthology happy dance time! One thing to count on with any anthology’s a running theme; the glue that binds the book. In this dark collection there’s two; a cursed object and a baddie. Not being a spoiler I’ll cough up the basics and leave the rest to you; directors Scott and Kameron Hale have quite the puzzle if you’re game. The opening scene shows a board; ‘Free to a Bad Home‘ chalked on it, a flickering flame in the foreground. From the trees in the background a pair of legs drop, suspended sharply just above ground level. Suicide? Murder? Next, a dingy bedroom. A TV buzzes static, ‘free to a good home’ scrawled across its screen. A man wearing undershorts and t-shirt straddles a bedclothes-swaddled form and fires a shotgun into the pillow. Dripping and a distant baby’s cry are all that’s heard in the ensuing silence.

Ok, I’m in.

A couple are jogging together. Reluctant, the man pauses for breath. A belt hangs tongue-like down one side of a box by the road; ‘Free to a good home’. Who can resist a box like that? Delving in, he produces a necklace, which when tried on by his lady friend appears to bite, as an insect might. Put off by random thoughts of bedbugs, she’s off again, followed by her man, but not before he pulls out a diamond ring.

‘Amy’ is part one of the anthology. This is where I ran into some difficulty, which happens to me a lot. Similar-looking actors. Here’s a young woman, looking very like our aforementioned fitness-fond girl. She’s visiting what appears to be her uninhabited family homestead, but clearly there’s not many fond memories here, at least in the more recent past. We see a montage of her on top of what looks like a grain silo, two parked cars, and her placing her hand on a wooded section of ground, whispering “I’m sorry,” before entering the house and proceeding to imbibe large quantities of wine. Odd things begin to happen (keep an eye on the background). She falls asleep in one place, wakes up in another, clothed differently, bloody and bruised. The patch of ground she put a hand on is oozing some nameless noxious-looking gunge. She’s soon joined by what appears to be her sister. They get drunk, but settling in for the night, there’s noises. Another person-type noises.

Investigation reveals nothing to Amy, but we see a sheet-covered figure rear up from a bed. Things go from bad to hellish for her before the sequence begins again; except now she goes straight to the house, and hearing sounds, heads upstairs with a knife. ‘Ryan’ is a thief. After breaking into what seems like an empty house, he finds a familiar-looking girl in chains, who gives him a diabolical ultimatum, deepening the mystery.

‘Julia’ is an addict, off to a party, and while still mysterious, this segment’s also mesmerising; dreamlike music and ultraviolet neons shatter into shuddering nightmare as the jagged jigsaw begins to fall into place, escalating into the viscerally horrific. We all know everything has its price, and after watching Free to a Bad Home you’ll never see free stuff the same way again. Don’t open containers of unknown origin; you never know what may come out.

7.5 out of 10 Mystery Boxes