Year released: 2016
THE CHARGE: Encouraging cinematic ADHD by hopping onto the anthology bandwagon.
THE EVIDENCE: Let's get this out of the way: I don't care much for anthology films. Most of them are lazy endeavors held together by the loosest of threads. They're generally the refuge for directors who have ideas but neither the budget nor the expertise to develop them into full length features. But the success of anthologies like the V/H/S and ABCs of Death movies have ensured that we'll be accosted by these short film collections for some time to come. Holidays is one the most recent additions to the genre and, like almost all anthologies, offers stories of varying quality.
Holidays offers short films centered around, you guessed it, holidays and presents them in chronological order as they occur in any given year. So it starts with "Valentine's Day", directed by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, centered around an awkward teenage girl who has a crush on her high school gym teacher. He feels sorry for the girl when he sees her being picked on by the cool kids, and leaves a valentine's card in her locker. The gesture sends Little Miss Awkward to the moon, and she realizes that she has to return the favor with a gift of her own. As soon as she starts stalking one of her bullies, it's pretty clear how this one is going to end. It's an unoriginal but perfectly acceptable way to kick off the anthology.
Next comes "St. Patrick's Day" by Gary Shore, which is by far the most twisted film of the bunch. A mischievous and magical young girl grants her teacher her dream of becoming pregnant. After an absurdly long gestation period, she finally gives birth to a large snake who she lovingly treats as her child. Mother and child are eventually worshiped by a very strange collection of costumed people who may or may not be druids based on the large tree that they all dance around. And that's pretty much it. Not much here in the way of story, but this one was more about the ride and I have to admit that it kept me guessing as to which direction it would go. Not a great film, but an enjoyable curiosity.
Then comes "Easter" by Nicholas McCarthy. It opens with a stilted bedtime discussion between a young girl and her mother about the origin of Easter. Mom talks about Jesus while the little girl asks about the Easter bunny, and the girl keeps getting the two of them mixed up. Later in the night, the girl is awakened by noises in the house and gets up to investigate. What she discovers is no surprise at all if you've been paying attention to her part of the earlier conversation, but it's very well executed and gleefully grotesque. Despite telegraphing the ending from a while away, "Easter" manages to become one of the highlights of the anthology.
Oh, mood lighting, you understand me better than anyone.
Sarah Adina Smith's tribute to "Mother's Day" is next and I'll admit, I had to wikipedia the movie to remember what this one was about. It's a completely forgettable story about a woman who keeps getting pregnant whenever she has sex and her quest for a reliable method of birth control. Her doctor sends her to a special clinic that turns out to be a witches coven, and they keep her sedated so that she'll stick around to become the vessel from which some creature/demon/thingamajig will sprout forth. It's a tired story with tired performances and, despite the frequent presence of bare breasts on the screen, it left no impression on me at all. It's a major lull in the collection of films, but not the worst of the bunch. That will come later...
But it's definitely not "Father's Day" by Anthony Scott Burns. This one is the best film of the bunch by a wide margin, and it doesn't rely on violence or gore to be a creepy masterpiece. In it, a young woman gets a package from her father who disappeared many years ago. It contains an audio tape that gives her directions on where to go so they can meet again. The bulk of the film is simply scenes of this woman walking down various streets, listening to the tape with headphones, but the tension starts building once she hears a girl's voice that sounds like she did years ago. But it can't be her, because the tape is being narrated as if it's all happening right now. It concludes with a gut punch that made me pause the film to catch my breath. "Father's Day" is THAT good and make Holidays worth seeking out.
Next we get the best known director in the bunch: Kevin Smith - yes, THAT Kevin Smith - and his take on "Halloween". Sadly, his effort is miserable. It's the worst short of the bunch by a country mile and doesn't even have anything at all to do with the holiday it supposedly occurs on. In it, a sleazy guy running a camgirl website refuses to give his three employees the night off for Halloween. One of the three camgirls happens to be Smith's daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, which adds a whole new level of ickiness to the story. When their employers get belligerent and violent, the camgirls knock him out and force him to conduct his own webcam show, which involves a butcher knife being inserted in a very sensitive area. "Halloween" is Kevin Smith and his worst, and yes, I've seen Cop-Out. It's crass, it's off-topic, and even from a stylistic standpoint, it's the cheapest looking short in the anthology.
Everyone has the same reaction to the VR version of Robot Chicken.
Things get back on track with "Christmas" by Scott Stewart, a piece involving a father played by Seth Green who's waited until the last minute to do his holiday shopping and can't find the virtual reality toy his son has been asking for. He finds a store that still has one in stock and calls ahead to reserve it but when he goes to pick it up, he finds that the shopkeeper has already sold it to someone who just left the store. First come, first served. Dad tracks the mystery shopper down and offers to pay many times what the toy's worth but is denied. As he dejectedly walks away, he hears a thud and returns to see the shopper lying prone on the ground by his car, with a bottle of nitroglycerin pills scattered by his hand. Still alive, the shopper asks for help, but Seth instead takes the toy and bolts with it.
On Christmas, the device is unwrapped and we learn that the toy reads your brainwaves to provide a VR experience specific to each user. When Seth tries it on, he sees everything from the point of view of the fallen shopper as the man is picked up by an ambulance and carted away... to a morgue. Seth is freaked out, but gets freaked out a lot worse later when he learns what his wife saw on the device. This is the strongest short in terms of story, with a real Twilight Zone feel to it. But it's marred by an ending that just fizzles out instead of coming to any real conclusion, dropping the overall quality of the short down from "good" to "OK".
Finally, it's "New Year's Eve" by Adam Egypt Mortimer, centered on a sicko who picks up women on online dating sites, and who subsequently tortures and kills them. But when he finds a date for New Year's Eve, he runs into someone even more twisted than he is. It's basically a pitch-black one-joke comedy, but it's executed well and makes for a satisfyingly messy end to the anthology.
THE VERDICT: Holidays, like all anthologies, is a tough one to judge due to the varying quality of the short films it presents. I'm going to call it NOT GUILTY based on the incredible strength of "Father's Day" and supported by decent shorts for "Easter", "Christmas" and "New Year's Eve", as well as the bizarre "St. Patrick's Day". But I'm calling Kevin Smith out and judging him GUILTY of lazy direction, lazy screenwriting, and lazy (and really gross) casting of his daughter in a film that makes Jersey Girl look like high art in comparison. It's time to start easing up on the blunts, Moves!
