Holidays

Just one thing to say, that Easter Bunny is scary as hell. An Easter Bunny mixed with the Son of God has literally been taking out of the text and and I just think, holy. Pun intended.

I loved him because of how disturbing he was. The guy who portrayed him did a very nice job and the look of his character made it very memorable. Let's just say once you see him, you can't unsee him. It becomes burned into your retnas so that even if you wanted to look away, it wouldn't matter.

A very enjoyable nightmare.

I had such high hopes for Holidays, I adore horror anthology's and one featuring the writing of Kevin Smith and starring Seth Green and Harley Morenstein! Sign me up.

Sadly it didn't quite meet my expectations, and that is such a blinding shame.

You see horror anthology's are generally 3-4 stories and a wraparound, Holidays dismisses the wraparound and instead tells a whopping 8 short stories (Each one based on a different holiday).

This heavily reminded me of the ABC's of Death (2012) which was another horror anthology I was super excited for but turned out to be dire. That as well had a vast number of stories, different directors, writers and similar themes. Thankfully Holidays isn't that bad, but only because of a couple of the tales.

Truth be told several of the 8 are really bad and I mean really bad. They're the kind of shorts you'll see on YouTube that leave you scratching your head afterwards, unsure as to what you just witnessed and what the point of it all was.

Thankfully there are a few entertaining nuggets in there, some decent star power and sprinklings of charm. The stories range from weird, to gory, to oddly clever, but none exactly blew me away.

My pick would be Valentines Day as the most entertaining with St.Patricks Day being the worst...........or possibly Mother's Day.

Holidays on paper should have been fantastic but some disastrous writing near killed it for me, such a shame.

The Good:

Jocelin Donahue and Harley Morenstein

Solid visuals

The Bad:

Some really stupid stuff

Horror anthologies are always a risky business. With multiple writers and directors, there's bound to be an inconsistency in quality throughout. At least with this, given that the shorts, all based on a different holiday, are consistently bad, there is a consistent level of quality throughout.

Valentine: (2.5/5) A blatant Carrie rip-off with some dangling plot threads and a lack of explanation, but at least it gets the black comedy angle of the anthology right and has a clever ending.

St Patrick's Day: (1/5) A laughably stupid dud in every sense. What were they thinking?

Easter: (1.5/5) One good jump scare aside, this is tedious, tasteless and toothless.

Mother's Day: (1/5) A terrible body horror short where pretty much nothing happens. Oh, and then just when something is happening, it ends.

Father's Day: (3.5/5) A cleverly constructed and told short story which is arguably the best of the bunch in many ways, but it's still too open-ended and vague to satisfy.

Halloween: (3.5/5) An effective, squirm-inducing dark comedy that is both amusing and uncomfortable, although it is complete nonsense.

Christmas: (2.5/5) They had a great idea here... which they did absolutely nothing with and once again it ends just as it's starting to get interesting.

New Year's Eve: (2.5/5) More formulaic stuff which is mildly entertaining but just too predictable.

These films aren't scary, but they're not meant to be. They're meant to be dark, uncomfortable comedies. Sadly, the stories are weak and just lack any true meaning or point. I learnt something important in Film Studies: when you make a short film, the story should start when the film ends in a way. That's a good thing to remember if you're making a short film and that is basically what all these shorts do. But... don't forget to get the audience interested and actually give them enough information to leave them satisfied! Evidently, these writers and directors forgot that.

4/10

Horror anthology loosely organized around holidays, where each short is thematically related to a different holiday. The usual problem with these sorts of anthologies is wildly uneven quality, but in this case the quality is fairly consistent and reasonably strong. One of the many oddities of "Holidays" is that the worst short is the one by the most famous director included here, Kevin Smith. It seems like he wasn't even trying with his Halloween short and its disappointing that they gave the most on-topic holiday for a horror movie to someone who seems so disinterested.

Another oddity is that the first five shorts all have female protagonists, with only one being written and directed by a woman. It is almost immediately apparent which that is, not because it is appreciably better or worse than the others, but because of its attitudes toward its female characters, and the way it handles nudity (something that is mostly absent in the rest of the shorts). The fact that several films in a row all feature not especially strongly drawn or unique protagonists, some of whom are almost interchangeable, is a problem. The shorts are organized chronologically through the calendar year, starting with Valentine's Day and ending on New Year's Eve, but I think it might have been better to reorder them so that a sense of repetition didn't start to set in before there was some variation. The final short is actually the best, in terms of telling a compelling story with the most interesting characters we meet in the whole series. It is largely a two-hander and ends on a satisfyingly twisty note. And that brings up a third oddity -- all except the final short, and Smith's, have intriguing ideas, set-ups and situations that the various writers and directors seem unable to resolve in a very satisfying way. Some of them just end, some try for a conclusion that is perhaps meant to be ambiguous or disturbing, but they fail to stick the landing. Its strange to watch a bunch of short films in a row that share the same strengths and the same weakness.

I'd say most of the writers and directors represented here show promise, even if most of them don't quite deliver as fully as I'd have liked, and I look forward to more from any of these filmmakers. I don't know that I'll be returning to this collection of shorts anytime soon.

I didn't expect much from this movie, but even my low expectations weren't met. The only 2 semi-entertaining chapters (Easter and Father's Day) had very unsatisfying endings. The rest of the chapters were GARBAGE.