Originally written August 26, 2016

Holidays is an anthology horror film that puts a dark spin on eight of the holidays found in our calendar year. The movie first caught my attention because one of the segments was directed by one of my favorite directors, Kevin Smith. Each of the eight segments focuses on a different holiday though. While I do have some thoughts on the movie as a whole, I find that for anthology movies it’s best to just review each segment individually, so here we go.

Valentine’s Day: The first segment, Valentine’s Day, starts the movie off with a strong start. A teenage girl has a crush on her gym teacher, but she’s seen as the outcast by her peers and is bullied by the other girls. The girl decides to do something crazy as a romantic gesture for her gym teacher. The story of the segment isn’t particularly original, as the story of a girl getting revenge on her classmates that bully her has been seen before in many movies, such as Carrie. However, the reason I enjoyed this segment so much is because it just has a really strong presentation and delivery. While none of these segments are any longer than 10 minutes or so, this one was a strong one to start off on, as it hooked me from start to finish.

St. Patrick’s Day: In this segment, a young teacher is pregnant, but is told that what’s living inside her is a monster. A student of hers teaches her the truth about the legendary snakes of St. Patrick’s Day in a frightening way. I found this segment to be pretty confusing most of the time. I appreciate what the director was going for here with his style, but the flow of it all was so weird and bounced around between scenes in a really confusing way. Like Valentine’s Day, this one wasn’t exactly an original concept (the movie Rosemary’s Baby is even referenced in it as being a similar situation), but it does have a different kind of style than I’m used to, although that’s not entirely a compliment. Coming off of Valentine’s Day, I found this one to be a little disappointing, but the thing I can definitely praise it for is that it does have some pretty disturbing imagery.

Easter: The Easter segment revolves around a girl that’s questioning her mother about the origins of Easter. She’s scared of Jesus because of what she’s heard about him coming back from the dead. She wakes up to see the Easter Bunny, but is in for a shock. This one felt kind of pointless, but at the same time I enjoyed it for what it was. This is largely due to the fact that up until seeing this segment, I can honestly say that I’ve never seen zombie Easter Bunny Jesus on film before, so there’s that.

Mother’s Day: Keeping in the theme of putting a dark twist on each holiday, rather than being a celebration of motherhood, the Mother’s Day segment is about a woman who gets pregnant every time she has sex, even if she makes the guy wear two or three condoms. The emotional stress of getting so many babies aborted makes her go to a meeting for help, but she finds herself involved with a coven of barren witches. This one was probably my least favorite segment, although it probably didn’t help that this is the second segment to revolve around terrible pregnancies. Even though I wasn’t big on the St. Patrick’s Day segment, I did at least think that it had some redeeming qualities, where with this one I just thought it was pretty bad all around.

Father’s Day: A woman finds a cassette tape from her father that left her when she was a little girl. The tape explains that he had to leave her for reasons she wouldn’t understand, but it gives her instructions on how to find him if she wants to know. I’m not sure if this segment or the Valentine’s Day one was my favorite. This one had my favorite concept of all of the segments by far, to the point where I would love to see this idea realized in a full-length film. However, the one thing that keeps this segment from being as amazing as it could have been is that it has a terrible ending. I don’t even mean that in the sense that it was a dumb ending, but more that it just kind of ends abruptly without any real conclusion. I thought it was really weird that it built up this really interesting mystery and then just didn’t give any real pay-off to it. Up until the ending, this segment is fantastic, but unfortunately it loses it right at the end.

Halloween: I guess you could say that this is the segment that I watched the movie for, since this is the one directed by Kevin Smith. This segment is about a man running an internet sex cam business that treats his employees like garbage. So, on Halloween night, a group of three girls working for him decides to get revenge. I really liked this segment, but I didn’t understand what it had to do with Halloween aside from taking place on that day. Anyway though, it was fun watching how the girls get back at the guy, although it ends in kind of a weird way. I don’t think this is one of the absolute best in this anthology, but it’s still pretty decent.

Christmas: A new virtual reality device is released that allows each user to see what they want to see in it. A man tries desperately hard to get one of these devices for his son for Christmas, and in the process allows a man to die just so that he can get the last one from the store. As the man tries out the device, he finds the imagery haunting him of his crime. This segment features the most recognizable actor in the anthology, Seth Green. I really enjoyed this one a lot, as it takes the man on a really haunting journey. However, there isn’t really any real payoff in the end, so it felt kind of pointless when all was said and done.

New Year’s Eve: A serial killer goes on a date with a woman that winds up being just as twisted as he is. This one definitely wins the award of having the least amount to do with its holiday, as it’s really just taking place on that night and otherwise just being like any other kind of slasher movie. I didn’t find this one to be particularly terrible, it was just kind of disappointing because it feels pretty uninspired. It just feels like little effort was actually put into this one, although it still serves its purpose.

So, now that I went over each segment individually, I just wanna say a few words on the movie as a whole. Holidays is a pretty uneven anthology movie, with some segments being noticeably better than other ones. However, this always seems to be a common problem with anthology movies. When you have a bunch of different directors with different styles putting their own segments into a movie, the flow just isn’t always there as much as it is in regular movies. Luckily though, I do feel like I was enjoying myself more with Holidays than I wasn’t. It might be obvious, but one problem I found with almost every segment is that they never seemed to know how to end them. Even the most interesting segments winded up having the problem of having a bad ending, and so afterwards you just kind of wonder what the point was then. I think that for the concept alone, this is the kind of movie that’s worth checking out with some friends just to enjoy the dark spins put on each holiday, but past that this is no masterpiece by any means.

3/5