Watched it last month or so
It was aaaaaaaaaaight
I watched it last night. While there are definitely some keepers, there is also more than a few duds.
Here are my personal rankings, from best to worst :
Father's Day - 4.5/5
Original, subtle, and filled with tension. Almost a mystery film. The director was patient and respected that the audience would be patient too. The pay-off
would have felt cheap if not for the excellent set-up. Definitely the class of this film. Didn't hurt that it starred Jocelin Donahue, who some might remember as the girl from
The House Of The Devil (2009).
St. Patrick's Day - 3.5/5
The most surrealist segment, and I imagine that this will likely be the most contested. I could see some people loving or hating it depending on their taste. Me? I love bizarre, ambiguous stories like this. I also enjoy cult/esoteric/ritual based stories. So this was right up my alley.
Easter - 3/5
Scary and strange. If Father's Day was the most tense segment, this was the scariest to me. Actually manages to comment on the absurdities of Easter as it relates to Jesus/Catholicism without feeling like it's lecturing at you. Cool monster design/performance.
Christmas - 2.5/5
With a few tweaks, this may have fit in as one of the
Black Mirrors "White Christmas" segments. They had a chance to reach that type of satire/modern critique/future warning, but they settled for a cheap twist-ending that doesn't really add anything to the story. This wasn't unbearable, but it was definitely the biggest missed-opportunity, because the potential was there. It starred Seth Green, if anyone cares.
Mother's Day - 1.5/5
I can tell that they wanted to say....something here. But the story felt unrealized. I think this was meant to draw upon some of the paranoia and story beats of
Rosemary's Baby (1968), but it has not the craftsmanship to make that comparison flattering. It doesn't help that the St. Patrick's Day segment, which I rated higher than this, comes before this segment in the film, and actually seems to do what Mother's Day thinks it's doing in a far more entertaining (and scary) way.
Valentine's Day - 1/5
Man, I love, love LOOOOOVE me some stories about young, awkward, creepy, outsider, high-school girls. Before y'all
, let me explain :
Carrie (1976), May (2002) , Excision (2012)....when this genre is good, it's usually *really good*. I'd probably throw
The Craft (1996) into this lot as well. So I like the type of story that they were trying to tell here...they just failed to give us any reason to care about the raging girl, and that is a MUST, because that's where the heart of these types of stories lie. It's not enough for them to just be bullied outsiders, you have to show some sort of deeper explanation for their pathology (Bad parents, poverty, confidence issues, etc) This segment relied on an insanity/delusion twist....so it has no real point.
New Year's Eve - .5/5
I didn't get much of anything out of this.
A serial killer goes on a blind date with a potential victim....he gets more than he bargained for. You've probably figured the twist just off of that short description and that's because we've seen this story plenty of times before. This added nothing new nor did it have anything to say.
Halloween - 0/5
- Directed by Kevin Smith.
- Starring his daughter (17 years old).
- As a cam-whore....
This dude fukked around and made the worst segment while simultaneously portraying his own daughter as a smut. A faux-feminist message that is nowhere near as clever as he probably thought it was. To top it all off, this dude didn't even use the holiday-theme right, and he had the easiest and arguably most important holiday for a horror based anthology! How you gonna have Halloween, not use any Halloween imagery or tropes, and make the worst segment? Kevin Smith is done y'all.
TL;DR : Not a complete waste of time, but as with the
V/H/S/ or
ABC's Of Death series, you might have to sit through some trash to get to the goodies.
Southbound (2015), another recent horror anthology, was far more consistent and I'd recommend tracking that down over this one.
I'll believe it when I see it 
