Holidays

A typically erratic horror anthology, Holidays tells eight stories revolving entirely around specific days – including Easter (a young girl has a less-than-cheerful encounter with the Easter Bunny), Halloween (three webcam models take revenge against their sleazy boss), and Christmas (a meek father pays the price after he steals a coveted gift from a dying man). It’s clear that Holidays takes an awfully long time to get going, as the movie’s first half is littered with uninvolving, aggressively meandering entries that test the viewer’s patience – with the very first tale certainly setting a low bar for everything that follows. The ineffectiveness of that opener, Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer’s Valentine’s Day, paves the way for a series of equally disappointing stories, with, especially, Sarah Adina Smith’s Mother’s Day squandering what could (and should) have been a chilling entry by emphasizing silly, inexplicable elements. Holidays remains stagnant, then, until it reaches Anthony Scott Burns’ Father’s Day, as this segment boasts a slow, creepy build that’s heightened by atmospheric visuals and a strong performance by Jocelin Donahue. (The ending is a little too ambiguous for its own good, admittedly.) The remainder of the stories past that point are, generally speaking, entertaining and engaging, although Kevin Smith’s Halloween is disappointingly lacking in the memorable dialogue for which he’s known. (It’s impressively gory, at least.) Holidays closes with a generic yet entertaining New Year’s Eve tale from Adam Egypt Mortimer, and yet it’s ultimately clear that the film’s proliferation of poorly-conceived segments drains the viewer’s enthusiasm for those that fare better.

** out of ****