Next day is Easter Day 2021 and by some sort of cosmic serendipity, today’s film is 2016’s Holidays, a horror anthology film in which nine different film-makers present eight creepy tales revolving around different holidays, including Valentines Day, Easter and, of course, Christmas. Only one short segment is actually about Christmas, which feels like a bit of a cheat, but this is my quest so I’m having it, thank you very much.
Naturally, there are varying levels of quality across the different tales, but the good thing about compendiums like this is that if you get fed up with one story, another one will be along soon enough to try and win you over. The opening ‘Valentines’ story is all a bit obvious and silly, with echoes of Carrie in its uninspired campy Mean Girls-style plot of teen bullying leading to a very unsurprising murder.
The ‘St Patrick’s Day’ segment is far more affecting and creepy. It’s a thoroughly Irish chapter that feels like a freaky Wicker Man meets Rosemary’s Baby mash-up. It’s all very weird, disturbing and memorable, featuring Ruth Bradley as an unassuming teacher dealing with a curse that terrifyingly ties into the snake imagery of the St Patrick legend.
‘Easter’ is, fittingly for today, the strangest, most shocking and borderline blasphemous of the tales, conjuring up a nightmarish, body-horror answer to the question of just what the hell eggs, bunnies and baby chicks have to do with Jesus and the Easter story.
‘Mother’s Day’ tells another demonic pregnancy story with a trippy California desert peyote vibe, but has a lot of menacing build-up to a pretty poor jump-scare pay-off.
The ‘Father’s Day’ chapter is more like it, generating an atmospheric sense of dread with its tale of a young woman following clues from an audio cassette from her deceased dad that lead her on a disturbing journey to the dark side…brrrrr…
The ‘Halloween’ section directed by Kevin Smith is the biggest let-down, telling a lame torture porn revenge tale, with three online ‘cam girls’ exacting a horrific, sadistic revenge on their pimp. It’s hard to tell if this one is trying to be funny or scary but it disappointingly ends up being neither.
At last, we arrive at ‘Christmas’ from experienced horror director Scott Stewart, which turns out to be one of the best of the lot. This blackly comic vision of a dark near-future features Seth Green as Pete, a dad desperate to get his son the latest must-have gadget – space age virtual reality goggles that, creepily, appear to interface with the user’s soul, or something.
The opening scene is darkly humorous and totally identifiable, with Pete arriving seconds too late to get the last gadget in the store and facing the dilemma of calling an ambulance for a fellow shopper having a seizure, or leaving him for dead to get his hands on the prize. No prizes for guessing what he chooses and the rest of the segment sees him plunged into some sort of dystopian Black Mirror style nightmare. Though he’s come through for his kid, through the power of the goggles Pete ends up inadvertently revealing more of his dark side to his wife (Clare Grant, Green’s real-life missus) than he would ever want to.
It all quickly spirals out of control and impressively squeezes a lot into its short 14 or so minute runtime. It really captures that feel of frantic Christmas-shopping determination, examining how far we’re really willing to go to satisfy our loved ones.
If I have a grumble, it’s that, of course, it’s all over too quickly. The major twists and turns about our characters’ dark sides don’t carry that much weight, because we never really get to know them in the first place. It’s a real solid effort, though, and would benefit from being fleshed out to feature-length.
Rounding things off is the ‘New Years’ section involving a serial killer getting more than he bargained for when he uses a dating service to select his victim. It’s alright but holds no great surprises and doesn’t do much to tie into the whole ‘holidays’ theme.
So, it's a film of hits and misses that suffers from having too many tales to tell, but not giving any of them room to breathe. Still, I come hoping for a decent yuletide horror chapter and am not let down. This serves as a perfectly acceptable Easter bonus and a sneaky partial break from constant Christmasyness, allowing me – just for today – to have my chocolate egg and eat it.
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