suite92
The Cycle Segment: Sketcher---Mira, Tiny, IrmaSketcher is the overview segment. Mira wakes up low on contextual memories. The people near her advise her to read the sketch books that Mira herself supposedly authored. Oi, there's a rotary telephone receiver.The first book was about WORM; the protagonist is an office drone named William, who works at Nimrod Enterprises.After completing the WORM section, Mira talks to Tiny and Irma, then starts reading again. This time, it is the Amber Alert section of the picture book.Vonda and Ally visit Mira, then Mira starts reading the Pink Snapper segment.After Mira finishes Pink Snapper, a drunk comes in followed by Susan. Yes, the same Susan as in Pink Snapper. Susan makes it clear she's going to kill the guy.Mira finds a second book. The voices in her head tell her to read the book and to remember. She goes to a suite where Irma and Tiny are. Irma speaks of regeneration. She had drawn Mira, who is a young version of herself. Mira kills Irma, and Irma's spirit (or whatever) passes to Irma as low energy lightning.------Work Life Segment: W.O.R.M---WilliamOne meaning of WORM is the derisive nickname that a lazy co-worker gives William. His office is in the basement, and he circulates through the offices above doing computer waste pickup work. The other meaning, W.O.R.M., concerns controlling people remotely using nano-technology.William has just gotten his online 'degree' (whatever that means) in computer programming. He tries to interest the people in the offices of Nimrod Enterprises about his fake accomplishment. The people around him are self-involved and delusional, as is William. William thinks he will get a promotion into R&D. Then he tries to join an online porn/companionship site. Not surprisingly, this does not go well for the inexperienced young man.To get on top of things, William gets the 'Nano Idea' disk, loads it, and figures out how to use it. Right. In terms of motivation, William's aim is to make (literally, as in to force) other people to like him. What could possibly go wrong? Quite a bit. Everyone wants to see him since he unintentionally e-mailed the nano virus (nonsense, of course) to everyone in the offices above.Unfortunately, the virus causes people to become zombies. The authorities contain this, and lock up William because he started it, because he did not turn into a zombie, and they don't understand why not.------Home Life Segment: Amber Alert--Vonda, Lamont, AllyVonda is quite pregnant. When she is alone for a short spell, the TV won't stay turned off, and she hears of several abductions of girls ages 7 to 10, including Ally. She sees Ally in her back yard. Ally acts strangely, and shows demonic transformations. Vonda goes back into the house, locks her doors, and tries to hold up while familiar things in her house change shape. She calls her husband Lamont to come home, then faints. When she wakes up, he is there. They discuss the missing girls; Lamont had not heard of Ally. She rewinds the TV, but cannot find what she had seen before.Vonda has odd sightings at the grocery store. People seem to change before her eyes. She walks home, and finds a poster for Ally on the way. She telephones, in but the other end has never heard of Ally; the poster for Ally reads Amber when Vonda goes to quote from it. Vonda and Lamont get in an argument when he gets home. Lamont experiences the horror after that, seeing the abducted girls transformed into monsters. He gets a ride in his car, with the car under control of someone else. This does not end well for him.Back at the house, Vonda has more visitations from the abducted girls/monsters. She gets to find out some of Lamont's secrets. The monsters come for Lamont (you will know why) as he's about to do in Vonda. The baby decides to show up about then as well.This segment has a happy ending, except for Lamont.------Sex Life Segment: Pink Snapper---Susan, EricSusan gets a call from her brother Eric while her drunken cop uncle Jack sleeps. When she gets off the phone, he molests her again. Eric shows up soon, and engages the uncle, even though the uncle is heavier, trained, and stronger. Susan slams the uncle in the head with a skillet, very hard. They take the uncle's car keys. They take the car and put some distance between them and the dead uncle.Eric wonders what to do. Good question. They go to a house where they have a connection. Eric starts screwing Elizabeth, which is a really bad idea. Elizabeth's father Edgar recognizes that Elizabeth had killed Eric using the sexual parasite in her private parts. Edgar shoots Elizabeth in the head, killing her. Susan is upset by the yelling. She races upstairs, misinterprets the scene, and uses a hammer to kill Edgar. Great stuff. Three dead and quarts of blood strewn all over.She gets too close to Eric. Elizabeth wakes up just long enough to mark Susan with blood. The parasite leaves Elizabeth and enters Susan. That was quite a penetration.Susan survives this, and heads home to the recuperating Uncle Jack.Poor Uncle Jack. Sort of.------Scores-------Cinematography: 0/10 Sound: 8/10 Acting: 0/10 Hire some actors next time.Screenplay: 4/10 Not executed well, but there were story ideas in each segment, and the ending made sense, given the nonsense that preceded it. The editing was bad, the continuity was bad, and better direction might have gotten more out of the non-actors.
jfrentzen-942-204211
The on screen title III SLICES OF LIFE amusingly renders the "three" in its Roman numeral, aligning the look of its rough edges with the hand-hewn lettering on the covers of three "books of life," a central motif in this gruesome horror effort. This omnibus movie, which is neither as bad as some here have said nor as fantastic as others purport, alternately succeeds in its various reworkings of horror movie motifs and fails on some of those trappings, too. Apparently inspired by George A. Romero's CREEPSHOW but also owning much to the classic British omnibus flicks from Amicus and other studios (TALES FROM THE CRYPT [1972] comes to mind), 3 SLICES OF LIFE -- I shall drop the Romans as the end credits revert to the Latin -- is a mixed bag but one that, in the end, I liked. The best episode in the trilogy, SEX LIFE, closes the film. Neatly constructed, it weaves two seemingly unrelated tales into a clever pay off -- the heroine of the piece unwittingly inherits a literally monstrous family curse, which neatly ties up some plotting involving an incestuous horror that begs for final justice. The characters in SEX LIFE -- the villains, that is -- are not what they seem, which is a nice change from the previous two tales, which are much more obvious in their villainry. The acting in SEX LIFE is, likewise, far better than in the preceding segments, HOME LIFE and WORK LIFE. However, SEX LIFE (as with the rest of the segments) suffers from director-writer Anthony G. Sumner's insistence upon bringing in unrelated horror tropes (the legend of Countess Bathory, in this case) that have no business in the movie at all. Sumner shoehorns various in-jokes and references as if to tell the viewer he knows his stuff about Romero, Sam Raimi, and David Cronenberg -- as well as the more arcane trivia, such as Bathory. This indulgence takes away from the basic storytelling, though, which is otherwise good. SEX LIFE is good enough to stand alone without the baggage of 3 SLICE's framing story or the other pieces, of which the framing story is the most valid. It conjures a spooky was-it-a-dream attitude brought into focus via some supernatural folderol involving personality transfer; there is also a clever use of bringing in characters from the other episodes to create mild chills. The second segment, HOME LIFE is also smartly framed, presenting some truly frightening ghost children who haunt the very pregnant protagonist. But the piece is frankly overlong and the nice build-up of suspense is damaged by a very messy, gory finale. Here, again, Sumner has a handle on special effects sequences but tends to fall back on cheap tricks instead of trusting in what is essentially decent storytelling. The bane of many low-budget horror movie directors is they give up and rely on banal in-jokes and references to other movies to cover up obvious plot holes; or, they are just lazy and think a good wink and a nod in the direction of zombified George Romero-isms will tide them over. Meanwhile, the audience feels cheated. Sumner cheats us in the latter way in the first tale, WORK LIFE. An ostensible comic-gore romp, this segment offers a nerdy office worker who feels slighted and sends out his "zombie email virus" disk to infect the world. His transformed colleagues become drooling EVIL DEAD-like zombies and chase him around until destroyed by gun-toting government bio-terror soldiers, in the manner of Romero's THE CRAZIES. In spite of these excesses, Sumner is a talent to watch. 3 SLICES OF LIFE succeeds admirably in some ways, especially in the last segment. Its failings may be chalked up to a filmmaker simply trying to bite off more than he can chew.--Jeffrey Frentzen
James9670
Just read the reviews. Very easy to tell that they're written by people involved with the movie. Half of them were surely even written by the same person as they end in the same way, with an enthusiastic, "If you want to see a great movie or great horror or a good time or whatever, see Slices of Life" followed by an exclamation point. It's just sad that someone would go to that much trouble to get people to see a movie that's so terrible. Don't have much to say other than that. I get the appeal of wanting to make movies, it's what I'm going to school for. I think it's disheartening to see that some people worked so hard (it isn't easy, I know that, whether you're making something good or bad, filmmaking requires some real effort) on something that turned out to be garbage.All that there's left to say is, if you want to see a great horror movie with gore-galore and plenty of laughs..... well then maybe you'd be better off seeing something else!
