You could partake of an anthology movie as either a delicious degustation offering a satisfying series of tastes or a handful of lacklustre hors d'oeuvres leaving you hungry for something more substantial. This will depend to some extent on the quality of the movie and also on your taste for such a format. Arguably television is more suited to this: shows such as The Twilight Zone (itself spun off into a movie) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents showed that with good scripts and actors, the variety and tightness of format could work well, especially if there was a suitable host to provide a link.
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Having one (or sometimes more) stories per segment on TV episodes also avoids a problem in many anthology films: one good segment isn't enough to save a film where the others are bad, and one bad story can leave a sour taste even if the rest are good.
Fantasy Island is the latest attempt to tempt audiences with morsels rather than a full meal of a movie. It's a more horror-oriented take on the long-running TV series. The cautionary "be careful what you wish for" concept might seem a little odd given this was released in the US on Valentine's Day: is that a good idea for what might be a date movie?
Anyway, horror movies are quite well suited to the multi-story format. The classic Dead of Night (1945) set the template, with several spooky tales related within a wraparound story. Most of the stories were too slight to make full-length movies themselves but worked well presented like this. There was plenty of variety, with the stories including a premonition of death, a haunted mirror and a possibly alive and evil ventriloquist's dummy (before this became a cliché). The payoff was a good one, too.
The British studio Amicus - and its imitators - produced several such movies in the 1960s and '70s, many of them based on 1950s EC horror comics, like Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror. In most cases, the basic format of each story was that a nasty person did something bad and then would get a suitably horrible and apt comeuppance. They were often played by surprisingly classy actors (who could, presumably, get a decent pay cheque for not too much work).
In one of the 1972 Tales from the Crypt, Peter Cushing played a sweet, elderly widower who is persecuted by his nasty father-and-son neighbours until he eventually commits suicide, on Valentine's Day. The following February 14 he rises from the grave and leaves a grisly valentine of his own (complete with a still-beating heart). Some of the stories were bizarre tales of jealousy: in Torture Garden, a grand piano murders its owner's new lover and in Tales That Witness Madness, Joan Collins finds her romantic rival is a vaguely erotic-looking tree. These were dangerously close to risible as it was; making full-length movies out of them would be untenable.
The format has endured, with some Stephen King portmanteaus like Creepshow and Cat's Eye and more obscure efforts like Campfire Tales. The concept seems workable though the results don't tend to be well received. Perhaps more fleshed-out characters and scenarios work better?
No doubt there will be further anthology movies, horror and otherwise, but the unevenness in the content that seems inevitable and the bitsy nature of the enterprise make this risky. Anthologies are probably better left to TV.
