Holidays on Hulu: it happened before and after Christmas

My latest streaming double feature on Hulu was holiday themed—one Thanksgiving horror and one New Year’s horror. They made it to my holiday horror page by default, but did they make the season bright…I mean…dark?

INTO THE DARK: FLESH & BLOOD (2018)

This Thanksgiving installment of the holiday themed horror movie series on Hulu comes from the director of the My Bloody Valentine remake, of which I’m a big fan, so I was psyched going into it.

Damn! My hopes for a good Thanksgiving horror flick were dashed. For starters, while the film takes place on the holiday and the days after, don’t expect any celebration or even a turkey short of a brief flashback.

A teen girl who suffers from agoraphobia since the unsolved murder of her mother is trapped in her house with her father, played by Dermot Mulroney.

While he’s out one day, she may have forgotten to take her meds…and becomes convinced he not only killed her mother, but a whole bunch of other girls.

This makes for one of the most awkward family holiday conversations ever that doesn’t involve politics.

It’s dumbfounding to me that this dissolves into a completely templated thriller right out of the late 80s/early 90s. It’s virtually The Stepfather, hold the step. I’m convinced the script is attempting to make you think there’s going to be a really obvious twist…but then doesn’t deliver the obvious twist, instead sticking with the initial obvious plot as if that is supposed to be the twist.

MIDNIGHTERS (2017)

Midnighters is an apt name for this New Year’s Eve/Day movie, which turns out to be yet another holiday thriller, not a horror movie. This was a huge disappointment for me since it comes from IFC Midnight, and I usually really like their movies.

I’m not saying this is a bad film, it’s just not one I would have watched had I known what it was about. Once again, it’s essentially modeled after late 80s/early 90s thrillers, with some torture porn and home invasion elements thrown in to make it feel modern.

After leaving a New Year’s Eve party, a couple gets sexy while driving and accidentally makes roadkill out of someone. The surprising part is that they try to do the right thing and not just hide the body or cover up what happened, but eventually…they hide the body and cover up what happened.

They return to their house in the middle of nowhere, and pretty soon some new characters come into the picture. A tale of intrigue and deception is introduced, and one twist after another is thrown at us as everyone seems to be backstabbing the other.

There’s an endless loop of people getting knocked out, tied up with tape over their mouths, and tortured, then the tables getting turned as loyalties switch back and forth. So…we just wait to see who’s going to be the last person standing.

Eh.