Nightmare Radio: The Night Stalker

(2023)

Candy Blue is a night time DJ and has a stalker named Jack, as in The Ripper, as he tells her on the phone when he calls in. She has asked people to tell her their stories so all the anthology necessaries are set up quick and we dive in right away with a story about a failing photographer, Ellen and her unnamed husband.
Their relationship is strained to say the least, he's telling her to get a different job as he can't afford their bills and mortgage alone and she's depressed, spilling coffee on her laptop, pointing out the mortgage was his idea and rebuffing his advances.

They live in on an estate which I've seen people call dilapidated and abandoned and so on but let me explain, you need to be from the general area to know what it is:
New housing estates spring up in Ireland and the UK and often, the company building it goes bankrupt before completion so you can potentially have a ton of built and half built houses going to rack and ruin, save for the naive souls who bought in early.
That's what's happened here. Hence the long grass and the lack of other people.

Anyway, Ellen is awoken one night by foxes rifling through her bins and in the morning goes out to get some pics before becoming entranced with them and after hanging out at night in the rain with them, as you do, comes back and has some very aggressive sex with her confused husband. Her scratched up back and shifting bones make this quite unnerving but not as unnerved as her husband who wakes her up in the morning before she scampers off silently and nearly naked hopping fences like in Hot Fuzz. After going through her camera, her husband sees what's either evidence of her transforming into or mating with a fox just before she came back and sexed him up...either way...eww

We get a sense of time passing as we see Missing posters and her husband seeming more depressed and confused and unable to sleep due to the ever increasing fox presence. One night he goes out to yell at one and notices it as heterochromia, same as Ellen.
Err? dundundun?

God knows, it was splendidly atmospheric though and very well acted. In the most complimentary way possible, the actress playing Ellen was somewhat vulpine with her gorgeous red hair, big eyes and sharp chin. Very good start

Candy is called by Jack and his peculiar but sexy accent. He more or less proves he can see her which unnerves her.

Bob calls in to tell about the time his TV showed him a woman being attacked by a masked man in a hallway, Bob runs downstairs to find the attack happening and rescues the woman. Back in his apartment his TV shows him still there and being stabbed by the killer and Bob twists and writhes in pain as his stomach bleeds, Candy cuts him short saying his dreams don't count before switching lines and Jack's back, oiling down the phone, seems Candy stiffed him for a bottle of expensive wine in a bar one night and he's pissed.
As Candy lights a cigarette we see a silhouette enter the studio...oooh

Next segment we have a county worker, Sarah and she's showing filmmaker, Chad, an old cholera hospital,
he's planning to film his movie here and says he wants it kept in it's drippy, crumbling, creepy glory as he's interested in the tale of Mary Weaver who committed suicide here after a doctor cut her babys throat moments after she gave birth. Chad is thrilled with her expo dump which is done in a staring off into the middle distance-cy exposition type way that's just the right amount of meta. It also does camera flickers, revelling in it's own House on Haunted Hill vibe. Mary is of course real, she kills Chad and then Sarah and Candy is sceptical but the caller heard from a friend of a friend so it's definitely real  ¬_¬

Guess who calls in again? a thoroughly pissed off Candy tells him to fk off and when he calls back once more she threatens to call the cops before her line goes dead and Jack is knocking on her window with the bottle of wine and an axe, she runs into a room and he stops outside to tell her a story about women who go out at night and are all alone...
Two women are driving down one of Australia's many neverending roads, one is Liz from Wolf Creek but she's called Ellie, her sister is called Liz though and they're going to meet their mother. As they stop for gum and a pee, a man drives up and gets out of his car, he grabs Ellie and can't seem to get his words out, Liz sees a screaming, bloody girl in his backseat, the man hustles Ellie to his car and Liz freaks out, driving away and abandoning her sister.
She is followed by the man until she sees he has crashed into a tree, upon opening the car door she sees a dead Ellie holding a newborn baby, the bloody woman was in labour and the man was getting her help, all three are dead but the baby is alive.
Grim tale told,  Jack gets to pulling a Jack on the door and tells Candy he's not been able to stop thinking about her and now must have her then gives her two equally enticing options, she lets him in to rape her and then he'll go or he'll break in rape her and then torture her to death.

Honestly have no idea why this man has trouble getting dates...anyway, Candy opens the door and tells him to have at it and we go to the next movie which has no beginning or end. A family of vintners kill and eat other people and the mom is sick. That's it.

A bloodied Candy leaves the room alone, Jack is dead. She signs off.

Anthologies always have good and bad, only the last segment with the vintners was terrible, Foxes was the standout but I did have a soft spot for the retro late 90s feel of the asylum story.

If you like those campy, 80s nostalgia anthologies they've been bringing out then have a look.