Holidays (2016)

Good or bad, regardless of the outcome, this is a horror anthology after my own heart - like something pilfered from my metaphorical sketchpad of ideas - with each segment themed around a different holiday. Anthologies are fun; the themes give each segment a creative anchor to dance around; and together they form a set! It's too bad, then, that this anthology is so reminiscent of The ABCs of Death, with more often than not meaningless sequences with inconclusive endings that do not shy away from gore and nudity (although just as likely designed to repulse as titillate).

Valentine's Day starts off with some locker room bullying à la Carrie, the target being a high school girl with a crush on her swim coach, who is in need of a heart transplant (I think you can see where this is going). In St. Patrick's Day, a creepy grade school girl lays down some voodoo on her teacher, leading to the line, "have you ever seen the Hollywood movie Rosemary's Baby? If you replace 'baby' with a reptile...", emphasizing that these segments are not meant to be taken seriously. One of the better segments, Easter is pure nightmare fuel on steroids, featuring the most terrifying depiction of the Easter Bunny I've seen yet, and aptly demonstrating the symbolic clusterfuck that is a holiday sewed together from both its pagan (chicks and bunnies!) and Christian (a man rising from the dead!) roots.

Mother's Day centers on a woman with a condition the extreme opposite of sterility, who manages to get pregnant without fail, even while on birth control and when her partner wears three condoms. Desperate and having exhausted all conventional avenues of treatment, she heads out into the desert to play the totem in a fertility ritual that may or may not be Satanic (as the abrupt and unsatisfying ending fails to clarify). On the other hand, Father's Day is another one of the better segments (notwithstanding its obtuse ending), constructing an eerie atmosphere reminiscent of Silent Hill, when a woman receives a tape from her absentee daddy, sending her on an emotional scavenger hunt.

One couldn't be faulted for expecting more from the Halloween segment, especially considering that it was written and directed by Kevin Smith (who, at least, demonstrated a surprisingly good grasp of horror in Red State). It plays up the sexualization aspect of the holiday (and not much else), with a story about a trio of cam whores exacting brutal and humiliating revenge against their deadbeat asshole of a pimp. But all it does is make me wonder, when will the day come when people start writing stories about what a fair trade porn industry should look like, instead of fueling moral conservatives' nightmares (and feminists' wet dream revenge fantasies) of dehumanizing abuse and degradation?

Seth Green stars in the Christmas segment (what, no Thanksgiving?), which shows the horrors of allowing commercialism to trump the spirit of good will, via a VR headset that taps in to the viewer's imagination. "Ain't the holidays hell?" But Black Mirror this is not. Finally, we come to New Year's, in which two lonely singles meet for an awkward first (and last) date, with a surprising twist proving that you can never predict who you're going to meet on a dating website. Having come to the end, I can't say I would give this anthology my glowing recommendation, although it was at least as worthy a potential endeavor as the ABCs of Death was. (But we all know how that turned out). If you could watch the segments individually, though, I'd say give Easter and Father's Day a try.