Poor Becky. After walking for the length of the entire opening credits to her apartment, hopes for R&R get decimated by a phone call from an unnamed man who wants to tell her some “scary stories” and says she’s in … grave danger!
And also she’s in Jim Haggerty’s Grave Danger, a no-budget, shot-on-video anthology from the New York-based moviemaker whose name adorns the title. Not exactly the cachet of Tyler Perry, but perhaps a PSA of sorts, lest someone thinks they’re renting Quentin Tarantino’s CSI two-parter.
In the first story, paranoid Victor (Jae Mosc) believes he’s being followed by a tuxedoed chap, whom no one else sees. Becky’s reaction to this tale o’ terror? “Yes, it scared me. It was scary. Okay, is that what you want? Yes, it scared me.”
Then, there’s Carol (Kate Webster), who buys a gaudy tribal statuette that entrances her into donning lingerie and seducing deliverymen, only to kill them.
Thirdly and finally, Abe (Bud Stafford, The Putt Putt Syndrome) is a washed-up ventriloquist struggling to afford meds for his ailing wife (Kaye Bramblett, Squeeze Play). When a birthday party gig stiffs him on payment, Phineas extracts the debt in blood. Phineas is his dummy, BTW.
Oh, in between those vignettes, the caller (Jonathan Holtzman, Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl) convinces Becky (Debbie Kopacz) to undress to nothing. She complies.
Needless to say, none of Grave Danger qualifies as scary, outside of characters’ goombah pronunciations like “PAH-k,” “TAH-k” and “re-TAHD” for, respectively, “park,” “talk” and, well, let’s not get canceled. It needs a fourth story in which Haggerty explains how he convinces all these women — friends? family? apartment complex neighbors? — to take off all their clothes for, what, maybe $20 and free cardboard pizza?
Strangely, the one who doesn’t is top-billed Cathy St. George, erstwhile Playboy Playmate for August 1982, as Dr. Geraldine Masters, which I take as a reference to Don’t Look in the Basement. —Rod Lott