Holidays

I went into this with high expectations, and while "Halloween" and "Christmas" (the ones I expected the most from) proved to be disappointments, I found the "Father's Day" segment brilliant, touching and also terrifying. The manner in which the story builds thru the playback of a childhood recording, how she drives out to the middle of nowhere, and the suspense leading to where she was headed, all great elements rounding out a truly unique segment. I found myself on the edge of my seat from the time she started the tape to the very end.

"Easter" was bizarre and interesting and "St. Patty's Day" was pretty unexpected but cool. "St. Patty's Day" felt like classic British horror or something. Very elegant, artistic and suspenseful. The little girl did a fantastic job. "Christmas" suffered from what many shot-in-LA indie productions experience which was the total lack of snow, thus creating a true "Christmas" atmosphere. It was an OK concept, but overall not really scary or exciting. And I feel like the gadget the story focuses on will really date it in 10-15 years and seem silly. And I felt like "Halloween" was a total wasted opportunity. With the "Halloween" setting they could have done so much, but other than it being centered around 3 girls stuck inside on Halloween, you wouldn't know it was set on Halloween. No pumpkins, no trick-r-treaters, no atmosphere what-so-ever. Seemed more like that story could have been molded into any of the "Holidays" and I wish that segment went to someone who really cared to do something cool with it, as that segment alone could have really brought this indie anthology into "classic" territory. "Valentine's Day" was a classic style shocker and "Mother's Day" was pretty creepy, but had a weak ending. I was really hoping for a cool "Independence Day" story or "Thanksgiving", but maybe it was for the best since there was really only a couple standout segments. Overall, well worth the watch, even if a handful of the stories are throwaway. I'd compare it to "ABCs of Death", with about the same ratio of good stories.

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.

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

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 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.