This foursome offers up a nice mix of holidays and subgenres. They are all getting added to the holiday horror page, and one of them earns a spot on the homo horror movies page as well. But will you want them to be part of your annual holiday horror traditions? Let’s find out.
KIDS VS. ALIENS (2023)
An alien tale from V/H/S 2 gets extended into a full-length feature running a tight 75-minutes long. This is essentially like an 80s Steven Spielberg film with gore. Or…Stephen King’s Silver Bullet with aliens.
A group of nerdy tweens is regularly harassed by the town’s teen bad boy and his friends.
On Halloween night, all the kids end up at a house party without any parental guidance.
It isn’t long before aliens bust in and start dragging them away. Eek!
Our main kids get drawn into a pretty freaky underwater alien lair where they are subjected to some cruel practices…like being dissolved with acid. Frightful fun for adults, this film would be considered a full-fledged horror movie to kids.
There are plenty of atmospheric and suspenseful chase scenes, and our main geek girl gets to squash her hero envy with a sword.
But be warned, this film does not have a tidy ending and begs for a sequel. Also note that there’s tag scene after the closing credits.
AUTUMN ROAD (2021)
This isn’t your ordinary haunted attraction film. It’s a slow, brooding story that focuses more on those affected by the disappearance of a little girl on Halloween in a small town than it does on concrete horror.
Ten years later, the missing girl’s sister is going through a dark period and has an awkward relationship with her mother, played by Friday the 13th Part 7 star Lar Park-Lincoln.
Twin brothers, one sweet and one weird, were the last two people to see the little girl alive, and they are now running a popular haunted attraction.
The main girl befriends the sweet twin, and as they slowly grow close, she extracts information out of him about his last minutes with her sister on that tragic Halloween night.
Meanwhile, someone in a mask is doing some seemingly random terrorizing and killing. However, this film is not a slasher. “Masked killer” moments are few and far between, but one of them, which is a sort of stalking/home invasion sequence, is fantastic and fresh.
As intriguing as it all is with sinister October atmosphere, it’s also very bizarre and doesn’t quite come together—a lot of open-ended details leave it up to viewers to decipher what exactly transpired.
TWO WITCHES (2021)
Like a mashup of a Sam Raimi movie and 80s Euro horror, Two Witches delivers all the hocus pocus you could hope for. But don’t expect Halloween witches. They’re more like winter witches considering the events take place at Christmas time.
Broken into a few “chapters”, the film is essentially two different stories that come together at the end of the second part…sort of. Just like 80s Euro horror, there’s a lot going on here, it’s all really spooky, none of it quite makes sense, and there’s no resolution to clarify things beyond a promise that the story is “to be continued”. I’ll gladly take a sequel since the ride is so much fun.
The first part is about a pregnant woman who becomes convinced a witchy woman is stalking her.
She is friends with a couple that is into the occult, so they gather together one night to dabble in the magical arts to find out if she is hexed. Tension building edits and a slow burn atmosphere lead up to some freaky witch action.
The second chapter stars horror queen Kristina Klebe (Linda in Rob Zombie’s Halloween).
She is renting a room to an eerily weird young woman, played to witchy perfection by Rebekah Kennedy.
Kristina tries to be friendly and supportive, but Rebekah’s craziness moves into Single White Female territory. This is when the witchy goodness spins out of control…and into total chaos. But it’s so satisfying I didn’t even care. I’d especially like to learn how Rebekah pulls off this levitation trick…
Make sure to stick around for the after-credits scenes and the old school final frame moment.
LOVE HURTS (aka: Most Horrible Things) (2022)
Although I am not a fan of movies that piggyback on the Saw concept of throwing a group of less than pure people in a room to either physically or psychologically torture them, I watched this one because it’s a holiday flick with queer characters.
6 people accept an invite to a mansion for Valentine’s Day with the promise of winning money. They are greeted by a butler, played by the psycho Santa bear from Once Upon a Time at Christmas. He looks particularly hot when framed by penis head lighting.
He makes them sign waivers and takes their phones. Uh-oh.
The guests bicker and mock each other’s credentials to give us some character development, and then their host arrives and drags even more character details out of these unlikable people. The host is referred to as “they” by one character and doesn’t even give a straight answer when asked if they should be called “sir”, so we can only assume they are a they/them. They happen to be deliciously dark, bitchy, and condescending with no sense of personal space. I felt like I was watching an interview on the Drew Barrymore Show when they spoke with each guest.
While the host slowly draws dirty secrets out of each guest in what seems like an effort to get them to make romantic connections, the bulk of this film focuses on two gay guys—a hot Black gay and a snooty white gay. This is the highlight of this otherwise typical flick, because it dives into interracial dating, white tribalism, and bigotry within the gay community.
It all leads to the gays cat fighting, at which point I began wondering, “Why don’t the other guests just bow out of the offer of money?” And this is perhaps the most unique aspect of the film. They suddenly do all decide to pass on continuing to join in the Valentine’s Day festivities!
Of course, leaving isn’t as simple as it seems, so it’s a major letdown that there’s only one moment of violence and gore in the whole damn movie. Also, so many plot points feel like they’re left dangling, but there is an attempt to make the ending unique and unexpected. Unfortunately, the takeaway for me was that a) even when a majority of the focus is on queer characters, they are still going to be at the mercy of straight characters, and b) the whole point of the movie seemed to be to present an absurdly complicated way of going about getting a date.
