Director: David Ian McKendry, Rebekah McKendry
Year: 2018:
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Anthology
Plot:
Having a troubled date, a couple head out to a movie theater to watch a series of short films dealing with different terrors of the holiday season.
Review:
All the Stockings Were Hung-Stuck in an office Christmas party, a group of workers exchanging gifts with each other find the whole affair rigged with dangerous and deadly presents. Forced into going along with the demented game, they find themselves slowly dwindling due to the unpredictable game. This was a decidedly decent enough effort that really could've been a lot better. The idea of the rigged office party ritual with the gift exchange turning out to be deadly has the potential for some fun, and being forced to go along with the game the longer it goes on has the right creepy air to have worked nicely here especially with the way it's setup brings this about. The problem here is the lack of depth on anything that transpires, from the game he's forcing them to play to what's supposed to prove or even how everything got rigged up without their knowledge considering the extra amount of gifts present at the time. With a bunch of cheap-looking gore and a rather flimsy one-location setting undoing this further, it does have some flaws throughout here.
Dash Away All-Heading home from the mall, a last-minute shopper encounters a string of bad luck that prohibits him from getting home for the holidays. Meeting up with two strange women nearby with a sinister secret between them, he soon realizes the dire situation he's in and can't get out of. This one was a real struggle to get through. The fact that this one sets him up to be a guy with the worst luck imaginable at the wrong time of the year isn't a scary notion, spending so much time with the girls in the parking lot with him ends up driving this to boredom with the lack of payoff or even a connection to the holiday which makes it's inclusion tenuous and rather curious. The rules of dealing with the creature and it's conception are decent ideas, but this was a wholly disappointing entry.
All Through the House-Home alone for Christmas, a bitterly miser tries to find a way around the trappings of the season as the holiday spirit overwhelms him. It's not helped at all by the visitation of several holiday spirits determined to show him the error of his ways. This seasonal take on the classic story is fine if entirely way too cliched. That it plays itself off as such from the outset with the rampant bitterness of his character and the evolution of the ghostly visitation offers no surprises or scares at all. It's all going to play out exactly like the way it's supposed to, leaving the familiarity way too obvious in such a short running time. This really could've been stretched out to a feature-length effort and not made all the touches here to obvious despite the way everything turns out to tell a fine setup.
Arose Such a Clatter-Driving through the woods, a man accidentally runs over the reindeer Blitzen with his car and then leaves the poor creature on the side of the road to die. As he carries on with his trip, he soon finds than one of his friends might be seeking revenge against the incident. This one really could've been a winner had there been more involved with the budget. The central concept for this one should've provided this was a standout story of a massively enraged reindeer hunting down the driver responsible for killing one of his sleigh-pulling friends, yet the execution here is sorely lacking. The red-tinted lighting for the reindeer vision isn't creepy in the slightest, the fact that the creature is conceived through close-ups of a plush animal face and an antler prop isn't inspiring and it's so short there's barely any time to register what's going on.
In A Twinkling-Setting up for a dinner party, a woman tries to get her grumpy boyfriend to start celebrating the occasion which he immediately begins regretting. As the night goes on and they start to realize what's going on with their guests and try to get out of the situation alive. While this really could've been a lot of fun, at its heart there's more good ideas here than it's overall execution. There's something inherently chilling about the idea of being forced into participating in the bizarro series of games and dinner festivities with the glitching hosts that are impossible to get out of, in the end none of it's really scary and the end-game doesn't really help that much.
Wrap-Around-This is a wholly underwhelming section of the film. The idea of them sitting in a theater watching performance-art pieces in a community theater that turns into the movie-version tales we watch is just lame when it easily could've been them going to a film festival and the shorts on-screen are what's presented in the film which accomplishes the same fact, the intermission segment is just utterly pointless and although it picks up nicely with the twist in the finale towards what their overall goal is this is still a somewhat underwhelming section of the story.
Overview: **/5
Like most anthologies, there's some good segments and weak ones which balances itself out to the point of being a wholly decent entry without too much to sway it one way or another. Give this a look if you're a die-hard anthology fan or looking for full-scale Christmas-based horror fare, while those that are looking for more from their films should heed caution.
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