Holidays (2016)

okay guys how did I miss all these anthology horror films that have slipped down the pipe

I mean it.  There have been like four films released in the past year, and I've just been blithely ignoring them like small chickens, begging to be scooped into my mouth as I bellow "YEAH ITHZ OKAY I GUETHS."  I have a deep love for anthology horror, since it allows a person to experience the central core horror without all that pesky trappings or characterization.  There's the setup for about three minutes, then it's monster monster time yee-haw.  So, what happened?  The embarrassing answer is that I've had less time for horror movies since I've been experiencing social interactions, the thing that probably kills serious horror discussion, since it is a damn difficult balancing act to have deep thoughts about slasher weaponry in a psychosexual connotion while looking someone in the eye and telling you how much you love them.  But I'm trying my best here, guys!

At any rate while browsing through a completely legitimate film site for something for my girlfriend and I to watch, I saw Holidays, which billed itself as a collection of short horror films, each one related to a various holiday.*  That's just corny enough to work, I said, trying to ignore that one of the directors was fucking Kevin Smith.  After all, the guys that did Starry Eyes, the film that should have been considered the best horror of 2014 instead of the fucking Babadook, had a story in it!  It can't be that bad, right?

And the truth is that it's not all bad, but holy shit the chaff to wheat ratio for this anthology is fucking grim.

The primary issue with the film is that there are a whole eight stories packed into a 105-minute running length.  Most of the stories feel truncated and slight as a result, which is more frustrating when the few good'uns ended pre-maturely, making me rage at the foolish producers for allowing the fool films to remain.  I kid, of course, as I'm mature enough to understand that balancing all these different directors and concepts into a cohesive settlement that made everyone happy is a feat unto itself, but still.  Eurgh.

So about the Starry Eyes guys, they get first dibs with Valentine's Day, which is basically a revenge murder story where a shy swimmer pines for her coach while being bullied by another girl.  Also the coach has to get a heart surgery and you see where this is going right.  The realistic eye towards social dynamics and swag camera shots from Starry Eyes  are there, but the level of setup required for a story like this with the allotted running time means the ultimate experience is like being shoved along very quickly by your parents through an interesting museum exhibit.

The second film, St. Patrick's Day, is similarly conflicting.  On one hand, the plotline, involving an Irish schoolteacher, her sinister charge, pagan rituals, and one aspect of St. Patrick's acts, is actually a fairly novel concept for how to make a horror short about this holiday (I expected something about fucking leprechauns or a monster with green blood ooooh fuck off).  On the other hand, the girlfriend and I agreed it was a fucking mess, with neither the horror or comedy elements coming off right, leaving a tepid, confusing mess with special effects that sabotaged any real creepiness.

Easter comes next, and it's basically a clever bit of creature work that no doubt spawned from someone snickering about the dictomy of the holiday existing around both Jesus and a magical rabbit.  It's creepy I guess, but really I barely remember it because it was too close to the orbit of the worst and best entries of the film.

The worst easily belongs to Mother's Day, which was a lazy mess in every sense of the word.  The plot barely relates to the actual holiday, being about some woman who gets pregnant super easily, who for some reason takes the advice of her doctor to visit a new-age fertility clinic in the desert that are (get ready) not quite on the up and up.  The unending barrage of pointless scenes filmed in "wow look at me" camera angles couldn't distract me from the fact that this plot has been done multiple times already, most notably with V/H/S2's Safe Haven.  The whole experience feels like a homework assignment done the night before, complete with the hilariously awful final sequence, which is the pregnant woman giving birth, except OH NO IT'S A BLOODY ARM COMING UP FROM THE DRESS the end d minus see me after class please.

you also might notice that the bloody hand is so evil that it's coming out of her left thigh, jesus christ

Washing off the stink slightly is Father's Day, the best of the bunch, a sentiment echoed by my significant other so it's OFFICIAL DEAL WITH IT.  It concerns a young woman receiving a tape cassette from her missing father, detailing to her how she can find him again.  It's an honestly really effective film for several reasons: the locations and shots evoke a steadily rising sense of dread, the plot is simple enough to peaceably co-exist within its time limit, and the fact that said father is voiced by Michael Gross, who depending on your cultural background, you probably know as the dad from Family Ties or the crazy survivalist guy from Tremors.  His voice through the tape's filter is a perfect mixture of fatherly love and "oh god no don't do that" creepiness.  The only real criticism is that the ending is maybe a bit too ambiguous, but with stories like this I tend to prefer creating mystery over the "you see the truck was Dracula all along" plot poop bubble burst that occasionally appears in films like this.

It says alot about the level of quality in Holidays that the film done by Kevin Fucking Smith is arguably the second best.  I mean, oh sure, Halloween basically has nothing really to do with Halloween, and yeah Kevin Smith's meathanded attempts at tacking girl power and online harassment still reeking of white duder viewpoints could be discussed ad nauseam, but it's filmed well, and there's some admittedly clever lines.  You win, Kevin.  Fuck.

Christmas wins the "biggest waste of potential reward," featuring Seth Green as a beleaguered husband stealing the holiday's primo toy, a VR machine that shows you what's inside your head or something, from the hands of a dying man.  Unsurprisingly, he begins to see things from the perspective of the dead guy, and I settled in, expecting a serviceable, maybe even clever, techno-rehash of the "guy gets X transplant from mystery donor, things go to shit."  But for some reason, perhaps due to the running length, the story goes in a totally different, absolutely absurd direction before just deciding to abruptly end.

New Year's Eve is about a serial killer who finds a vulnerable date for the big ball drop and if you aren't able to figure out the twist already you haven't seen enough horror films.  This one exists, and it does not offend me, but I cannot sense its being either.

So, Holidays.  I could barely partake in it as a giant anthology horror nerdlord, and my slightly less irradiated girlfriend thought it was ass.  Ultimately it's something to watch, but I wouldn't mark it on your calanGORE eheheheheheeeeeahhhhh.

*: a weird coincidence is that two of the other anthology horror films last year were also holiday related, though focusing on a single holiday instead of the golden HORRORAL experience, make of that what you will

Tales From the Hood (1995)

s Why are black-centric horror films generally pretty awful?  By black-centric, I mean the modern trend of hollywood equating movies with a black cast to have some sort of an "urban" bent.  Generally, this sorts of films are the most generic possible plots with the addition of some terrible THUG LIFE aspect.  I rarely see them in video stores, but apparently there's some dark and sinister subsection of BET that's producing them, since they seem to premiere a new take on "VAMPIRE GANGSTER HEIST INSERT WEED JOKE HERE" every month or so.

There are exceptions, of course.  Most would probably point to The People Under the Stairs and Candyman, films that used the whole notion of black people being the underclass to more affluent white people and added a horror bent to that.  However, I'd also argue that Tales From the Hood should also be considered a classic in this category.  If the title doesn't make it obvious, Tales From the Hood is a horror anthology, divided into four stories with an extra "framing story."  The latter involves three INNER CITY youths planning a drug deal at a funeral home maintained by a mortician whose face pretty well determines how things are going to end up here:

 oh hai guys clarance williams iii here

The mortician, being the one with the drugs, is able to leverage his way to telling the four main stories.

Three of the four stories are pretty generic (though not really bad) social commentaries with a horror twist.  The first involves a former black cop who quit the force after seeing his corrupt cop partners beat and murder a black activist.  One year later, he lures the cops to the gravesite of the activist for revenge purposes.  It's basically the Thin Blue Line version of Creepshow's "Father's Day," even to the point of the zombie activist (whoops spoilers I guess) having telekinetic powers.  Still, it gets to the point quickly enough, and there's nothing technically wrong with this story (nor really any of the other stories).

The second story is all about domestic violence, with a kid telling his COOL AND HIP BLACK TEACHER that he's all bruised up because there's a monster beating him up.  The monster, of course, is his stepfather who has a tattoo of MONSTER on his arm.  Monster, monster, monster.  Happy ending due to child apparently having power to kill people by ripping up his drawings of them.

The final story involves a evil gangster who is arrested for his crimes, but takes an offer of freedom by participating in a "rehabilitation program" that is basically the Ludovico Treatment, but with more spinning chairs and nurses in weird latex fetish uniforms.  I'm not sure whether it or the Monster story is the worst one of the bunch, as while the final story features some shocking and provoking actual photographs of violence against blacks, the impact is diluted both by the pictures being intercut of footage of guys in bandannas jumping around firing guns, and the program director (who is basically a solemn Whoopi Goldberg) telling the gangster, "Cain was the first murderer, Crazy K.  He killed his brother HOW MANY BROTHERS HAVE YOU SLAIN?!?!?!"  I understand the message is that black-on-black violence is just furthering the cause of racists, but there has to have been a better way to express it.  Eventually, the gangster fails the treatment, and is sent back to the moment he was arrested, except now instead of being arrested, he's killed by the three gangster in the framing story.

Oh yeah, and then when the gangsters are finally revealed the coffins where the drugs are purportedly kept, they instead find their corpses and oh wait the mortician is actually satan.   

Ultimately, I just wanted to use this review to talk about the third story, which is easily one of my favorite short horror tales, KKK Comeuppance."  When you open with a political ad stating: "You can give it any name you want.  The fact is, affirmative action, quotas, reparations, all mean one thing: Another qualified individual won't get a job or an education simply because he's not the right color.  I thought that's what we were trying to get away from," dissolving to the picture of the whitest person imaginable, you know whoever wrote this had some fun.  The whitest man alive is running for senate, was a former Klansman, and every thing he says is basically what I unironically heard while living in Arkansas.  He's also living in a house that was the site of a former slave massacre which resulted in alot of displaced souls until a later owner transferred all of the souls into dolls.  There's even a picture hey why is one of the dolls whited out???

this was basically what reading highlights as a kid was like

Like all killer doll stories, we get scenes of the doll inanimate (though still able to trip an Uncle Tom image consultant down the stairs), randomly appearing in spooooooky places.  Eventually it reappears on the staircase, prompting KKK Guy to declare that "THERE WILL BE NO REPARATIONS" while throwing a bowl at the doll, and declaring war on a "VOODOO BITCH" while impaling a painting of her with her dolls with an American Flag.  Eventually the doll attacks directly, but is quickly subdued, and tied to a dartboard, though KKK guys uses a shotgun in lieu of darts.  All looks well as "NOT EVEN SOME VOODOO NEGRESS BITCH SPELL CAN OVERCOME THE POWER OF A DOUBLE BARRELLED SHOTGUN," but the painting now suddenly has roughly six dolls whited out.  White supremacy oopsie, as now he's dealing with a whole bunch of "YOU LITTLE...NIGGLINS."    Also, the original doll returns, and the double barrelled shotgun isn't so helpful now, so he retreats to the previous room only to well

 

 

 (seeing this as a 10-year-old really had a profound effect of my attitude towards other races)

In perhaps the most subtle bit of writing ever, KKK Man covers himself with the American flag as the dolls approach and you get the rest.  Again, easily the best story of the bunch, in acting, writing, and general horror movie vibe, like a top-tier Tales from the Crypt episode.  That's the complement, by the way.

Again, it's not really a must-see horror film, and one could even call it a series of spooky morality tales with the exception of KKK Comeuppance, but it's still probably the most socially challenging horror film about black people (and really in general, unless you count silly WHITE PEOPLE PROBLEMS), which is fairly depressing when you think about it.