Fantasia ’15 Review: TALES OF HALLOWEEN

USA/2015/World Premiere

Directed by: Neil Marshall, Lucky Mckee, Darren Lynn Bousman, John Skipp, Mike Mendez, Ryan Schifrin, Paul Solet, Axelle Carolyn, Dave Parker, Adam Gierasch!

Stick a gaggle of deviants together in a room and it won`t take long before someone mentions their love for Halloween. Hidden amongst the norms for most of the year, you can normally sniff these people out, if you`re careful and smart about it:  a black cat accentuates at least one article of their clothing, skull shaped masks adorn their abode, white grease paint is constantly found in their creases, the color orange is pretty much everywhere, they are giddy when holiday meat is carved. They have also been known to have huge libidos, to be great in the sack and are apparently way above average in intelligence. Great. In. The. Sack.

Tales of Halloween got the rockstar welcome during its world premiere at Fantasia Fest 2015. All is right in the world when a Halloween film can screen in July in front of a ravenous audience. A product of the Joe Cocker school of filmmaking (getting by with a little help from my friends), Tales of Halloween is incest the way God intended: people related through their love of something, making sweet sweet film babies together. In the era of crowdsourcing and co-production chaos, cross pollination and resource pooling just makes sense. You can also tell that the whole cast had a blast splicing this together.

This is a film comprised of 11 short segments wrapped around the same central idea. I’m not going to write specifically about each short, but will mention my surprise at not being able to immediately tell which director was responsible for which short. The debate after the film was half the fun (the films were properly credited at the beginning but after the 10th, it sort of got a little blurry). You basically already know the drill: eleven (or was it twelve) tales centered around that most hallowed of weens. Rife with atmospheric bliss, there are many winks and self references throughout to really tug at those nerve endings. Unlike watching an X-mas film out of season (more on that in a separate review), there`s never a bad time to be reminded of the magic of Halloween and I`d like to think that most of the audience was transposed to that magical time of the year, where you can essentially ignore every piece of sound advice your parents gave you: go out at night, take candy from strangers, sacrifice a goat to the dark one. There`s also a nice wrap around narrative by way of everyone`s favorite midnight DJ: Adrienne Barbeau, reprising her role from The Fog. The shorts are snappy, straight to the point, and dripping with the good stuff. There`s this thing with Halloween flicks in that they need to mix the perfect batch of fright vs fun, and I think everyone understood this going in.

The short film format lends itself to late nights with friends, libations, and frequent, rigorous circle jerks, which my some of my fellow Fantasia fest patrons were not really on board with. There`s a problem with that and I’ll get to it in a bit. Each short was like a little piece of candy wrapped in miscellaneous wrapper. You don’t really know what you will get until you`re right there in it, whether you like it or not. There`s straight up splatter, horror comedy, thriller, slasher, adventure, romance, ghost stories. Basically, everything that reads off a Netflix genre description list. It`s the assortment though that can make or break any bag of candies. If I’m to knock this passion project, it`s that the cut we saw was a little jagged in terms of progression. That`s the thing with short stories: it`s very much like DJ’ing (selektah mon!). The combination of pieces chosen, in the order chosen, will ultimately be a show of whether or not you had a good set or a bad one. Individually, the stories stand on their own, but it’s how they are strung together that can make or break a collaborative effort like this one. Put too many suspenseful stories together, and things tend to get boring. Put too many shock/schlock splatter films together, and it could get tedious. I feel like there might still be some work to be done on the final combination but this is very much a small, insignificant gripe. Call it sexual frustration by way of titillation.

In closing, I remember leaving the premiere surrounded by film nerds who were nit picking certain aspects of the film. Some said they straight up did not enjoy it. These aren’t big picture people. People who shit on movies like these are the same type who complain about fluids during sex. They are dangerous, unhappy people who regret their life choices or are genetically predisposed to not having fun. There are places for people like these. Tales of Halloween was inconsistent, rough around the edges and even self indulgent at times (you can practically hear the cast high-fiving each other throughout). It takes a hedonist/narcissist to recognize another and that`s exactly what Halloween is about: having a good time, titillating one another in several places, and maybe, just maybe, reminding you of something dangerous and fun that may be lurking around the next corner. A holiday classic.

So long sunshine, I’m out!

Jo Satana