Holidays (2016) – Movie Review

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Holidays (2016)

Despite the fun concept, it sure ain’t no Creepshow

Directed by holidays-poster

Kevin Smith
Gary Shore
Matt Johnson
Scott Stewart
Nicholas McCarthy
Dennis Widmyer
Kevin Kolsch
Sarah Adina Smith
Anthony Scott Burns

 


This is a fun idea for an anthology. There’s a short tale for each of the US holidays during the year. They’re labelled horror but, some are just weird tales. Despite the fun concept, the stories were mostly mediocre. None of the shorts take the time to set up the mood and spirit of their corresponding holidays. There are a few that I found moderately entertaining. Easter is weird and disturbing and although it didn’t have a clear explanation of the events, the visuals stuck in my craw. That damn Jesus-bunny freaked me out a bit. In Mother’s Day, a woman who can’t stop getting pregnant goes on a health-related retreat and finds herself with a coven of witches. I love Christmas Horror stories and the one here, starring Seth Green, was a pretty good one. A dad steps over a man having a heart attack to get the last UVU virtual reality game set. Somehow the machine taps into your mind and gives you a specialized personal VR experience. When he and his wife start to see what’s in each other’s minds, that’s when he gets a real nasty surprise. And finally, the New Year’s segment is a fun little short about online dating. Good times.

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The stories are too short to garner any real empathy for the characters or to have any complex plots. As far as horror anthologies, I wouldn’t rate this very high, it sure ain’t no Creepshow. It’s more along the lines of ABC’s of Death. If you wish to kill some time and get moderately entertained by some horror shorts, you can give Holidays a try. You have a 50/50 chance at being entertained.


Moderately entertaining horror anthology but I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it.

I give it 2.5 creepy critters out of 5 on the horrific holiday antho scale.

V/H/S 2 – (2013) – Movie review

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V/H/S 2 – (2013)

First thing, the wrap around story is almost as annoying as the one in VHS because it’s a continuation from the original film. A private detective is hired to find one of the extremely annoying college kids from the 1st film and winds up in the same dark house. He tells his assistant to watch the video footage, maybe there will be a clue on them. So we enter the segments.

Clinical Trials follows a man who gets an experimental eye implant. The digital eye boosts all the optic wavelengths, which in turn has the disturbing side-effect of enabling him to see ghosts. It is damn unnerving to have knowledge of all the spiritual activity surrounding him. There is one scene that didn’t make too much sense to me but I guess they had to throwVHS 2 pic 2 some nudity in here somewhere. The biggest drawback was that the character in this was a bit of a dill-weed and I didn’t really care about him. However, it was a decent segment and equal to the quality of the original VHS.

A Ride in the Park follows a young man on his morning bike ride through a large wilderness park. He has one of those helmet cams on the roof of his noggin. A screaming lady runs out of the woods in front of him and when he stops to help her, zombie horde city! There are a few nice wrinkles in this zombie tale including a contradiction to the notion that zombies have no memory of their past life. A fun segment with some comedic aspects added to the gore.

Safe Haven follows a news team that is let into the compound of a secretive cult. The team doesn’t know there is a reason they were chosen to enter the commune and it has to do with one reporters unborn child. As the investigation and interviews proceed, the cult leader starts chanting into a PA system and literally, all hell breaks loose! This one will get your heart VHS-2-pic 6pumping with echoes of The Evil Dead (1981). There’s even a Sam Raimi style ‘punch line’ at the very end which made me laugh. Despite the punch line, this is the creepiest segment of all.

Slumber Party Alien Abduction follows a young woman and her bratty younger brother who continuously prank each other and capture it all on camera. In one piece of footage, there are some light anomalies on the lake behind their house. Later that night a piercing sound shatters the dark and they are in the midst of aliens who chase them down and attempt to kidnap them. It’s total chaos as these creatures disappear and reappear in different places, hunting them down. After watching some lousy alien abduction films lately, this one really makes the situation tense. It’s edgy and ramps up the scares, perhaps revitalizing this sub-genre of horror.

The wrap around story concludes with not much interest from me. I would say that the first two segments were as good as the ones from the original VHS, but the last two were better than the stories in the previous film. The real time aspect of found footage films doesn’t leave a lot of room for depth of a story but I think that’s what people like about these films – everything is in the here-and-now. There was a little more attention to storyline and plot, especially in Safe Haven and except for the first segment, I actually liked the characters in the stories of this film. So my opinion is that, overall, this film is a better film than its predecessor. Recommended for those who like FF films, anthologies, and ‘action-horror’ (yes, I’m coining a new sub-genre).

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Related Links:

V/H/S

Scary or Die

V/H/S (2012) – movie review

VHS coverV/H/S (2012) – movie review

This is a fantastic modern anthology worthy of your attention. Directed by Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, and the filmmaking team, Radio Silence, V/H/S delivers five found footage shorts that are on the cutting edge of horror films. In the first few minutes we are introduced to a rowdy bunch of hooligans, nasty characters for which I could not feel any empathy or concern. I thought I was going to hate the film because of this, but luckily it is just the wrap around story. When these hooligans break into a home in order to find some nasty home-porn VHS tape, the real good stuff begins. One culprit sits to view-search the many vhs tapes as the others search the vacant home. Thus we are introduced to the five stories. ‘Amateur Night’ shows how a one-night-stand/bar pick-up can go horribly wrong. Though it seems like a simple and much used theme, it is done quite well and the strange young lady is interesting, to say the least. ‘Second Honeymoon’ has a couple on vacation in the mid-west, in a story that gets creepy as hell and ends with a shocking plot-twist. ‘Tuesday the 17th’ may be the scariest episode, just because of the visual aspect of the killer in the woods attacking a group of campers. ‘The Sick Thing that Happened…’ was perhaps the best story and had some engaging creepiness in the context of video chats between a guy and his girl. We see some strange things running around the woman’s apartment in the dark behind her concerned ’skype-face’.  ‘10/31/98’ follows a group of young men breaking into a ‘haunted house’ on Halloween. They discover another group of men, religious fanatics in the attic, doing some kind of cleansing ritual to a young woman. They save the young lady from the witch-hunt, only to discover, maybe they shouldn’t have. I know there is a bit of a back-lash to all the found footage films in release these days, but this one is done with the rawness and intentionally sloppy editing that makes the stories seem genuine.
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