All posts by MovieDork

Scifi anthology movie

I Don't Know the Name... (unsolved movies)

I saw this on TV in the early aughts (~2003?), but it was long enough that it’s probably a movie (or possibly a “movie” made up of combined episodes of some TV series I am unaware of).

  • English language
  • color
  • looked to be about mid-late 1990s, but possibly earlier.
  • I remember 2 segments, but there may have been more.

Segment 1:

A young woman receives notice that she has reached an age where she will be executed by her society. She freaks out, and decides to climb to the top of the gigantic skyscraper that they all live in, I forget why, but she believed that at the top floor she could access something to save herself. The bulk of the segment is just following her struggle to reach the top.When she gets there, she finds the leaders, and they tell her that the climb to the top was the test for proving she deserves to live, and joining the community as an adult.

 

Segment 2:

A middle-aged man thinks he will die soon, and is struggling to come to terms with his mortality. He has an android built that is his exact duplicate, programmed to be like him, with the intent that it will carry on his business and life after he himself has passed. He “tests” it by having it go on a date with his wife/girlfriend, to see if she can tell the difference between it and him; she doesn’t realize it wasn’t him. Later, when she realizes what he did, she becomes justifiably outraged, because of the lie, and also because she had had sex with the android that night, while thinking it was the man. I forget how this segment ends.

If there was a 3rd or 4th segment, I don’t remember them.

Couple’s home is haunted by dangerous otherworldly “men” who collect lost things from people

Solved!

I saw this on tv between 1999 and 2004(?), it’s probably a movie, but it might also have been an episode of some kind of anthology series, and I don’t know the run-time — at least half an hour. Language was english, but it might have been dubbed. I only remember a few scenes. Based on the look, it likely dates after 1990, but before digital was widespread; it appeared to have made-for-TV quality. I could also be wrong about that, because it’s been so long.

Story:

A white man and woman live in a home where things seem weird and not-right. Also there’s a door that’s messed up.

The man works in tv – he’s an actor, and several of his scenes involve him at work, being filmed for what is probably a soap opera.

Scene: The woman is concerned about the weird things in their home, and a different man comes over to check it out. He points out that somebody had added a door to the home after it was built, and says that created a major imbalance, and it means that the added door sometimes opens to other planes of existence, or maybe it was just the spirit world. He demonstrates by jiggling the handle of the door, then opening it — revealing a glowing otherworldly void. “See?” he says, but then it sucks him in and he’s gone.

Apart from this scene, the couple start seeing strange figures in their home and lives. These look just like, if I remember correctly, men are painted blue — just painted that color, they looked similar to the Blue Man Group in that sense, though these characters speak — and when they open their mouths, they have cartoonishly sharp teeth. They are dangerous and malevolent, and have something to do with lost things people have forgotten about. Somehow, possibly just by moving in, the couple have gotten the attention of these otherworldly monsters, and is now in trouble.

Scene: The woman has somehow entered the space where lost and forgotten things are collected. It’s a room full of tables, and on the tables are all kinds of items, pieces of people’s lives that they have forgotten ever existed. The woman has only one chance to escape, and that’s to find something of hers that was taken. One of the creatures is stalking her through the room while she looks, and it’s the man who was sucked into the vortex earlier in the story; he now is blue like the others, and doesn’t even remember his own name. The woman finds the lost item at last, and is released; she’s beaten the creatures.

Last scene/twist ending: The actor is on-set, filming a scene where he’s been stranded at sea in an inflatable life raft, one of those with a built-in canopy. He is shocked to discover that some of the creatures are in the life raft too, they say something like “surprise!” and grab and drag him into the raft, their mouths open with fangs showing. That’s the end of the story.