Fêtes Sanglantes

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.

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.

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...

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.