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October 1, 2024

A Binge too Far #45: The Unhinged All Hallow's Eve duo (2013 – 2015)

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!

 

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.

 

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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