It’s four flicks for the holiday horror page, covering Halloween, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s Eve.
A HALLOWEEN FEAST (2024)
This is a dark comedy with horror queen Lynn Lowry as the psycho matriarch of a dysfunctional family (mostly due to her).
It starts 8 months before Halloween with exposition showing the mom’s descent into madness…beginning with her killing little animals. She also happens to be a dominatrix on the side.
Things quickly shift to two months before Halloween, and Lynn inflicts her insanity on the family. This is where you really need to suspend disbelief. She’s sent away for a short time, even though what she did was crazy as fuck, and when she returns home the family just goes on walking on eggshells around her.
Characters include a creepy grandmother (scariest part of the movie), a father mixed up with a mob, a goth girl who runs a magic shop (and who probably wishes she had been cast as Wednesday instead of Jenna Ortega), and some pretty normal offspring, but Lynn is really the focus of the film.
As her big Halloween feast nears, she goes all Serial Mom on anyone who tries to hurt her family, but she doesn’t stop there. The feast turns into a massacre as well. There’s sex, murder, and gore, but the macabre campiness does eventually turn sad and tragic.
For me, it’s two little girl trick or treaters that steal the show in the last few minutes of the movie.
HAYRIDE TO HELL (2022)
Although it’s a Halloween horror flick and not an anthology, the vibe, tone, and style of this one reminds me very much of the original Creepshow, right down to scene transitions. And it comes to us from Dan Lantz, director of the gay horror flick Into the Lion’s Den!
Bill Moseley is perfect as a farmer being hounded to sell part of his land. He runs a haunted Halloween attraction, and after things go horribly wrong one night, he decides he needs to get revenge on all those who are trying to wrong him, including the sheriff (played by Kane Hodder) and his deputy, who is a racist douche yet seems to be portrayed mostly as a cute and goofy kind of guy. Weird.
Moseley makes a deal to keep his land—if he can prove that his hayride is terrifying.
This isn’t set up to be a scary movie, so it’s basically just campy revenge kills as everyone on the hayride witnesses what they think are fake murders for a majority of the film. Of course we know where this is all leading…the people on the hayride will pay. My fave death scene features a huge drill.
AMITYVILLE TURKEY DAY (2024)
This one is a sequel to Amityville Thanksgiving. The therapist from the first movie is back, and this time he unleashes a talking killer turkey on the cast and crew of a movie.
I think they’re supposed to be filming in the Amityville house, but I’m not sure.
SRS Cinema is essentially the Troma of the 21st century, so this is just a cheap, silly horror flick that is also a rip-off of Thankskilling. The turkey drops one-liners, gets horny with women, and even does drag.
The best, trashiest aspect of this film is a murderous, bearish gimp chained up and wearing a turkey mask in the final act. This is the moment when you realize this movie would have been so much better if it had been all about the killer turkey mask gimp and not about a killer turkey at all.
SNOW FALLS (2023)
This is one of the first full-length films from horror cutie Colton Tran, who also stars in the film. Only problem is…it’s not much of a horror film at all.
A group of friends arrives at an isolated house in the woods to celebrate New Year’s Eve. They hit the hot tub, they FaceTime with Jon Bennett (a friend who can’t make it to the party), and then a winter storm hits.
The rest of the movie is sort of hard to believe. It seems there might be a Cabin Fever situation about to go on here. There’s a blackout, the heat stops working, and the group begins freezing…in an insulated house with a fireplace and plenty of clothes and blankets.
When they each experience hallucinations, they ponder whether they are suffering from hypothermia or if they’ve been infected by the snow. Don’t expect to learn which it is.
I usually like my buns warm, but I’ll make an exception in this case.
They each have pretty tame hallucinations (a snowman that looks like it comes to life like Jack Frost is the scariest one), and very slowly they are each pushed to dangerous acts.
The problem with a horror flick about everyone having hallucinations is that they’re having hallucinations. They don’t turn on each other, they don’t get infected. Simply nothing in the way of a hardcore horror plot. Bummer.
