There's something deeply frustrating about today's low-budget independent horror market. The reason is fairly obvious: The vast majority of this busy little genre's flicks are shot on video, a medium that—with rare exceptions—simply can't convey horror. Video is more in tune with family vacations and porn than to ghosts and serial killers. Yet it seems like every day a new straight-to-video piece of gore schlock hits the shelves, and let's be honest—it's almost always a big steaming pile of wet excrement. The only exceptions are films like The Blair Witch Project, that wildly successful ghost story that used the video medium to its advantage and impressed the hell out of many people, myself included.

Seduction Cinema's Cremains is a straight-to-video horror anthology made up of four segments and a framing device. The movie begins with an unnecessarily misogynistic and violent murder of a nude, constrained woman, then settles into the framing device, in which a mortician confesses to stuffing his crematorium with multiple bodies at once, then for no apparent reason starts telling horror stories. The first, a tale about a small-town cult, almost achieves some creepiness but is crippled by the video medium. The second, an overacted serial-killer story, has some promise but is crippled by the video medium. The third, a ponderous vampire-lesbian tale with lots of welcome nudity, is overwrought and—you guessed it—crippled by the video medium. The fourth story is instantly forgettable, save for a nice car-tire-crushing-head shot that made me sit up and take notice, but is crippled by...well, you get the idea.

Despite the wraparound story, there's a definite disconnectness to the stories, as if they were just thrown together. And the film, at close to two hours, is far too long. More precise editing would have brought Cremains to a higher level of watchability. At times, the film's director, Steve Sessions, shows some nifty stylistic tendencies that might have looked interesting on actual film. Unfortunately, special effects on video look plain crappy. Sporadically, there are also minor dashes of suspense, leading me to believe that Sessions might have some promise as a creator of horror films.

This straight-to-video presentation provides an ugly-looking non-anamorphic 1.66:1 transfer. The image is hard-edged, stark, and grossly desaturated, to the point at which many scenes appear black-and-white. The framing is mostly amateurish. Frequent video-camera special effects try for stylish but achieve only embarrassing. I've always found the shot-on-video look to be cheap, and this flick is no exception.

In general, sound levels are way too high, providing an ever-present distortion. All environment sound and dialog seem to have been captured with the microphone on the front of the camera, so you get all kinds of annoying incidental noise. I swear I heard the cameraman's fingers bumping the microphone a few times. When actors aren't facing the camera, their dialog is almost unintelligible. This is the kind of cheap soundtrack that produces headaches.

The DVD provides a few nice extras. Primary among them is a large collection of Seduction Cinema, Video Outlaw, and Shock-O-Rama trailers. I found these more entertaining than the feature presentation.

You also get a series of deleted scenes and outtakes (the Vampire Elabatorium), most of which feature a surprising amount of nudity, as well as commentary by actress Dawn DuVurger, who—gods love her—has no qualms about displaying her considerable charms for us.

Cremains is completely destroyed by its cheap look. I understand that video is an economical medium, and that the film would be impossible without the wide availability of handheld digital cams. To that, I say, Then don't make the damn movie, at least for mass consumption. Steve Sessions has some promise as a director. He shows a willingness to experiment with special effects and stylistic devices, and he seems to have a flair for suspense, but the constraints of a straight-to-video production have murdered this effort. Give this guy some real film!