31 Days of Halloween 2016: Tales of Halloween

2015, A Bunch of Directors (A Bunch of Stuff) -- download

Tales of Halloween is a classic horror comic style movie of interlocked shorts. In the comics, we would have a skeletal figure sketched into the title block, making quippy comments, where here we get Adrienne Barbeau as a radio DJ announcing things in an overly melodramatic fashion. It does not set an optimistic tone. This is an anthology movie for only people who like anthology horror movies.

Don't get me wrong, the cameos are fun -- John Landis, Joe Dante and... OK, so maybe now the cameos. But the interlocking pieces are cute -- it all seems to take place in the same neighbourhood with the same trick-or-treaters wandering around the different segments. But it is uneven and in a lot of cases, rather boring. One even goes so far, so so far, for a single jump scare. And one is a dopey metaphor for domestic abuse.

Using a familiar cast, where we are so used to seeing the Vancouver Crowd in genre TV, this is the Southern California Crowd with John Savage, Barry Bostwick, Greg Grunberg, James Duval and a handful of others whose names you won't know but faces are familiar. Everything is decently done, sort of mid-range TV level, but for one cute but surprisingly amateur stop motion bit. Really? Play-doh? That's all you could afford? But for the bit starring Sam Witwer, which just seemed to be better written, this whole thing was a big pile of 'meh' meant only for those Horror Kids that I mentioned in my post about Burying the Ex, which I should have probably left for this month.