Terror Tract: B

This day will go down in history as the day you learned that you can watch a horror anthology movie where John Ritter tells a story about Bryan Cranston hiring Buff Bagwell to assassinate an evil knife-throwing monkey.

I’ll let that sink in….

And one more time: John Ritter tells a story about Bryan Cranston hiring Buff Bagwell to assassinate an evil knife-throwing monkey.

What are you waiting for? Go watch this.

Terror Tract liberally borrows from the Creepshow playbook (even to the point where there is a Water-Zombie story) and the result is a goofy and enjoyable anthology movie about a shitload of unfortunate events that occur in the homes that jittery real estate agent J-Ritt is trying to slang to some hesitant suburbanites. “Full Disclosure” laws prompt Ritter to reveal the sinister history of each house and these histories give us our stories in the anthology.

There’s a story about a cheating wife who has a crazy husband. Put them together and apparently you get Water-Zombies. There’s another story about a dude with uncontrollable psychic powers that force him to unwillingly endure 1^st person slayings committed by a serial killer who wears a granny mask and says “COME TO GRANNY!” while he stabs people. The killer is called the “Granny Killer.”

These stories are all fun enough but there’s one that eclipses them: the one about Bryan Cranston hiring Buff Bagwell to assassinate an evil knife-throwing monkey. Before he was the one who knocks, Cranston was the one who gets upset about his daughter’s pets. It’s the same story as Tina the Talking Doll; Cranston’s daughter finds an adorable monkey and brings it into the house and only Cranston realizes the monkey’s secret homicidal intentions. He knows that monkey is up to something but his fucking wife and daughter just won’t listen! Cartoonish violence escalates at Roadrunner pace; you half expect Cranston to blow up his own house with a missile from Acme. Did I mention that Buff Bagwell shows up out of nowhere and Cranston pays him to fight the monkey? There are dead animals, corpses dissolving in barrels, a monkey throwing knives and shooting guns, Cranston channeling Heisenberg against the monkey (and his whimpering daughter), and some of the most high-brow comedy there is: a monkey in a baby carriage.