Holidays

This movie is nearly unwatchable but I made it through it to write this review. This movie can be found on Netflix and tells the stories of different plots and people for each holiday. None of the stories are good and only a few of them are sub-par. I have nothing else that I can say about this trashy, nearly 2 hour long movie. If you want to watch it, be my guest. Look it up on Netflix and maybe enjoy it...

So it isn't that easy to make an Anthology after all. That's one of the "positive" things you can take from watching this. If you're mean you could even argue that SyFy has done better feature length movies than most of the shorts being on display here. One thing is for certain: there is not much to cherish to be found here.

And it's a shame, because it did sound cool. Kevin Smith alone doing a short sounds great. But then again, I guess even he was either too busy with other stuff or somehow else occupied. Maybe something else happened, you never know, except you do know where the short stories are going. And almost none of them actually can create a mood, a tension, a story or anything else substantial to hold the viewers attention. There are some neat effects (the Easter Bunny story comes to mind) and occasionally a bit of quality that seems to shine through a story. But in the end, it's more like "whatever" and "why did I watch this again?" feelings that overwhelmingly win and leave you befuddled

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

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

Holidays does a few things right, and a lot of things wrong, and because of this, Holidays becomes a one time viewing. I don't ever see myself revisiting this flick intentionally.

Let me start off by talking about some of my favorite parts. Easter was a creepy highlight. But it didn't flesh anything out enough to make you care about it. This is a problem that almost all the parts have.

Christmas was my favorite part but it might just be my Seth Green bias. The ending wasn't as predictable as New Years, Valentine's Day, and Halloween.

Halloween was... stupid. And sadly, after Xmas, Easter, and New Years this might be my fourth favorite. You could tell it was Kevin Smith directing it. That doesn't help in my opinion.

New Years was actually a lot of fun, with 2 awkward characters. You could see the twist coming a mile away but that didn't stop me from enjoying it.

Valentine's, St Paddy's Day, Mother's and Father's Day all were lacking severely with the worst of them being Mother's Day. The ending was just abrupt and confusing. Father's Day had a lot of good build up to an awful ending. Valentine's Day really reminded of something out of Creepshow. Again it was predictable and the characters were way too over the top and just not believable in the slightest.

St. Paddy's Day had a lot of potential as it had a little girl who was seriously creepy. The ending was just bizarre and the whole build up was a "WTF" moment. It went from Day 12 to Day 366 in an instant.

All in all this was not a good anthology movie, nowhere near Creepshow or Trick r' Treat quality.