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| Art the Clown debuting in All Hallow's Eve (2013) |
October is Halloween month of course, and what a better way to celebrate it with a duo of movies set during horror fan’s most celebrated holiday!
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All Hallow's Eve (2013) DVD
All
Hallow’s Eve (2013)
Set in Small Town,
U.S.A. during Halloween night, a babysitter (Katie Maguire) finds an unmarked
VHS tape in a candy bag and proceeds to watch it with the kids she’s caring for
(Sydney Freihofer and Cole Mathewson). The tape is appropriate enough for the
occasion as it contains three horrible short films featuring a man in an
uncanny clown costume (Mike Gianelli) performing all sorts of devilish deeps,
including dismembering and disembowelling.
Director Damien
Leone was a master of the short film form by the time he managed to get this –
his feature length debut – off the ground, and it channels perfectly his
journey as a filmmaker as it incorporates almost entire segments of his
previous shorts and quite flawlessly too. But aside from presenting his first
feature as a ‘best of’ show-reel of his excellent previous shorts, this
absolutely works as a standalone entry; and what an entry that it is! One of
the best anthology horror films in the history of the (admittedly short in
numbers) subgenre, this is unexpectedly provocative and will hit you like a
hammer in the face; with Guinea Pig-styled
brutal violence that broader audiences never got to witness before. It is also
well-made and it deserves all the attention it received and deservedly made Art
the Clown a meme and a horror character star.
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All Hallow's Eve 2 (2015)
All
Hallow’s Eve 2 (2015)
A man wearing a
Jack-o’-lantern mask is stalking a woman until he is seemingly satisfied with
leaving a VHS tape on her doorstep. As you would normally do, she checks out to
see what is in the tape, only to witness a number of horror shorts.
Whereas the
original film pushed really hard its concept and succeeded (as the shorts in
that instalment were truly something otherworldly), this standalone sequel
doesn’t do much of this (as the shorts are pretty standard material, and the
whole scheme of the tape with the unknown origin doesn’t look much scarier than
a promotional gimmick, for example), and whereas the first time around we had
to face some pretty bizarre and uncomfortable taboo-breaking scenes (many of
which were reminiscent of Joe D’Amato’s glorious early 1980s days), this
unrelated sequel is mundanely standard and average (the unnatural dialogues are
farce-like and come across as if they were written by a film student). The many
directors involved made it easy for the haters to say that the horror anthology
subgenre should remain underproductive.
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