HOLIDAYS

Holidays Movie Review

Holidays is a 2016 horror/comedy anthology brought to us by new and fairly well-known directors, most notably Kevin Smith. Each installment is strongly to very loosely tied to a different holiday. Lets break this film down per segment, shall we?

Valentine's Day

We start off with a Valentine's Day segment, written and directed by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, the team that brought us Starry Eyes--this short is what would happen if that movie and Carrie could create a film love child. A girl with a crush on her swim coach is bullied by the team (one of the girls even dons the red ball cap and pigtails look from Carrie), gets her revenge on the main mean girl, and delivers her message of love to her coach in a most heart warming way. This segment was predictable, boring, and a pretty weak way to get things going.

St. Patrick's Day

Fittingly set in Ireland, the St. Patrick's Day segment sees a creepy girl (see above) giving her teacher a snake toy thing that is to bring her what she most wants--as it turns out, what the teacher most wants is to give birth, and after waking up in the back seat of a car after a long night out, she discovers dead snake skin, finds out she's pregnant with a reptile, decides to keep it, has a gestation period that lasts over a year, and gives birth to a twenty-five foot long snake with a pompadour hairstyle...it's even worse than it sounds.

Easter

After the first two segments, both disappointing and terribly unsuccessful at delivering horror or comedy, we are smacked square in the jaw with the Easter segment. Directed by Nicholas McCarthy (The Pact), this short finds a young girl in bed asking her mother about Jesus Christ and the Easter Bunny. Her mom explains the story of both, concluding that she must be sleeping when the bunny arrives because no child has ever seen him. The girl wakes in the night for a glass of water and comes across the bunny, who looks like a grotesque combination of a bunny and Jesus. Ever wonder how the Easter Bunny delivers the chicks? You'll find your answers here. The few moments this hero to children is on the screen are some of the most visually terrifying moments in horror history--it almost had my girlfriend in tears. Without spoiling what lies ahead in this review I will tell you this was the best, most memorable segment in the movie.

Mother's Day

A woman gets pregnant every time she has sex. After having about twenty abortions, she decides she may actually give birth this time and travels to see a coven of witches at a desolate location in the desert. Relative newcomer Sarah Adina Smith directed this snooze fest that will likely only be remembered as the segment with the most nudity and its final scene (I'll save you time--see the picture above).

Father's Day

Another newcomer, Anthony Scott Burns, brings us the story of a woman receiving an audio recording of her father, a man she has not seen in years and who she has assumed was dead. The recording gives her directions to where she can go to find him--the place she last saw him as a child, at the moment he was recording the tape. This short has a very strong build up and the tension grows with each step along the way. The cinematography is wonderful here, but most unfortunately, the payoff is extremely disappointing.

Halloween

After inexplicably skipping over Independence Day, our most recognized director, Kevin Smith, brings us the Halloween segment. I'm a horror freak (obviously...I mean, I DO bring you this blog after all) so it kind of goes without saying that I love Halloween, so naturally this was the segment I most looked forward to--upon seeing the opening scene it becomes painfully clear Smith is directing this one, and my excitement level dropped considerably. Don't get me wrong--I was, at one time, quite a fan of Smith's--Clerks still stands as a classic, and Mallrats and Chasing Amy are still watchable, but over the years Smith started believing the hype surrounding him and everything he touches seems to get worse and worse--this segment might actually be the worst thing he has ever done (and yes, I have tried watching Comic Book Men). The story: a porn site owner treats his porn girls badly and they get revenge, knocking him out, inserting a sex toy wired to a car battery somewhere akin to the back of a Volkswagen, and sliding him a knife to use to chop off his tallywacker. Why doesn't he just use the knife to cut the cable connecting the battery? I'm guessing it's because Smith threw this disaster together so quickly that thought never crossed his mind. Want to make it worse? The acting from the girls is some of the worst you will see...well, ever. Not bad enough you say? How about the fact that this is part of a holiday themed anthology, and the most important holiday in a horror themed anthology, and the tie in to the holiday is one of the girls casually mentioning it's Halloween so they should have the night off...and they are watching a cartoon with witches in it. This is by far and away the worst segment in this film, and reinforces my belief that Kevin Smith may be the most overrated director of my time.

Christmas

After skipping over Thanksgiving (I guess Eli Roth was too busy), Scott Stewart (Legion) gets us back on track with this segment. UVU glasses are all the rage at Christmas, and a man (Seth Green) watches another man die in front of him so he can steal a pair of the glasses from him. The UVU plays the thoughts, memories, and internet history of the person logged into it, and Green's character eventually finds that his wife's history may be even sicker than his own. While not fantastic, this one does deliver in bloodshed, and, compared to its competition, is one of the better segments of the movie.

New Year's Eve

Kolsch and Widmyer return to write the wrap up to this movie, a New Year's Eve segment directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer (Some Kind of Hate). We see a man shoot a woman in the head, then cut to another woman who sees the same man pop up as a recommendation on a dating site. They go out on New Year's Eve, and when she invites him back to her apartment, his intention is to add her to his list of victims, but this one is more than ready for him. After a slow middle to the segment, this one turns it up to eleven and brings the gore and madness. This is a well done segment and strong closer to this film.

Holidays will never make it on the list of best horror anthologies--"Easter" and "New Year's Eve" make it almost worth your time to watch this movie, while "Christmas" and "Father's Day" are enjoyable. The remaining four segments range from boring to dreadfully bad--should you decide to watch this movie do yourself a favor and skip right past them.

On A Scale Of One To Ten: 4

Holidays Movie Trailer