For every action in this universe, there is an equal and opposite reaction; such is natural law. Garry Marshall quietly birthed one of the less-ubiquitous cinematic universes with his sickeningly sweet series of holiday-themed rom-coms including New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, and the upcoming Mother’s Day. And in doing so, he sent out the saccharine cosmic energy that has now been transmuted into the joyless horror anthology Holidays, Tribeca Film Festival’s opening selection for their Midnight sidebar. This project, organized by a group of scary-movie stalwarts that includes Dennis Widmeyer and Kevin Kolsch (of Starry Eyes fame), Gary Shore (Dracula Untold), and Kevin Smith, must be by its very nature hit-and-miss. Unfortunately, the assembled talent racks up more misses than hits, and when Holidays misses, it misses by miles.
In the simplest terms, Holidays deserves the exact same review dealt to The ABCs Of Death and its sequel, V/H/S and its sequels, Southbound, and the rest of the pack of recent multi-creator anthology pictures: partly good, partly bad. The key variable is how much badness ensconces the good bits, and Holidays’ ratio is rather dire. It’s difficult to make broad statements about the film as a whole due to the huge disparities between its component parts, both in terms of style and quality, apart from the fact that each of the eight shorts sets a scene and then delivers — or fails to deliver — its punchline. A film this fractured and lightly gimmicky deserves a review to match, and so in that spirit: eight mini-reviews!
“Valentine’s Day”: The film beings on a relative high note with this sketch of a bullied high-schooler taking her crush on her swim coach a little too far. Widmeyer and Kolsch have lots of fun toying with lurid lighting schemes pinched from the dark fantasias of Dario Argento, even though they don’t quite suit the subject matter as well as they did Argento’s, and the dialogue bears only a passing resemblance to organic human speech. Props for somehow rounding up the biggest-eyed teen actresses in all of Los Angeles for this, though!
“St. Patrick’s Day:” Points for creativity, as this is the only short that engages with the mythology backing the holiday rather than simply setting a nonspecific story on that day. The Pagans are back to retake Ireland after being driven out by St. Patrick, and they brought the snakes with them. Director Gary Shore manages to pace the exposition of new information skillfully here, even with a truncated run time. And there’s something likably off about Ruth Bradley’s performance as a baby-crazy grade-school teacher who gets more than she bargained for.
“Easter:” This one plays like a child’s game of gross-out that clearly fancies itself as daringly sacrilegious, but is in actuality no more subversive than using a page from the Bible as a rolling paper. How the concept of “zombified Jesus Christ-Easter bunny hybrid” could be so un-fun is anybody’s guess, but at least director Nicholas McCarthy knows how to build tension through well-timed cuts. If a little girl kinda-going to zombie-Jesus-bunny’s third base by fingering a flesh wound is your idea of a good time, then McCarthy’s gift-wrapped this one just for you. (Also, please stay away from me and my loved ones.)
“Mother’s Day:” The best of the bunch, “Mother’s Day” delivers a sharp commentary on compulsory womanhood and the way society imposes certain cultural duties on women. (It’s a special kind of aggravating that the Holidays producers would hire only one female director for an eight-segment film, and then doubly so that they’d relegate her to Mother’s Day, but at least the upcoming all-woman-directed anthology XX will counteract that a touch.) But director Sarah Adina Smith draws up a novel, deeply unsettling fable about a woman who gets pregnant every time she has sex, in what I assume must be womankind’s greatest nightmare.
“Father’s Day:” Conceptually thin, plodding even at a length this brief, and amounting to hardly anything, the worst follows the best in this smorgasbord. A young woman receives a tape from the father she believed was deceased, and follows his instructions to find him; the majority of the segment simply shows her walking the anonymous streets of her town on the way to his hiding spot. It’s a dull lead-up to a punch line that isn’t even there. It’s more disappointing than a dad opening a gift-wrapped package to find yet another novelty patterned tie.
“Halloween:” A long day of Tribeca coverage has rendered me unable to tell whether it’s ironic that the biggest-name director turned in the worst short of the bunch by several leagues, but either way, Smith’s latest affront to taste is here. Casting his own daughter as one of a trio of camgirls who decide to take gruesome revenge on their cartoonishly cruel manager, Smith builds the entire short around one adolescent yet sadistic prank. Neither funny nor scary nor clever, there’s no redemptive qualities to be found in this one, and certainly not from a grating performance courtesy of YouTube personality Harley Morenstein. (Decent rule of thumb: casting people whose names usually follow the words “YouTube personality” seldom works out well.)
“Christmas:” Seth Green stars as a dad who hustles to get his son the toy store’s last It-Gift for his son, and makes a difficult moral compromise to get it. The hot present in question is a gadget called the UVU, a sort of VR headset that puts a viewer in their own wildest fantasies, though it does have room for error. There’s plenty of potential in this concept, but the short’s failure to set up a consistent set of rules for the Borgesian device along with a dull thud of a resolution hobble what could have otherwise been a tick in the positive-column.
“New Year’s Eve:” This entry hinges entirely on its twist, which outs itself far in advance when it emerges as the only possible explanation for the odd behaviors onscreen. A serial murderer preying upon lonely women makes a date for New Year’s Eve, the biggest night for sad single people on the calendar. Their painfully awkward chitchat at dinner clearly maps out where it goes next, though the revelation to come still has some shock value. Altogether, however, it’s eminently forgettable. Thanks again, Garry Marshall.
