It’s almost Easter time, so I dug up two more Easter horror flicks to add to the complete holiday horror page, along with two Halloween horrors and two Christmas horrors.
LARRY AND THE GRAVE IN THE PINES (2022)
I only covered this one because it is a semi-Halloween horror comedy (using that term loosely). I was ready to turn it off about 20 minutes in, but I stuck it out for the full agonizing 106 minutes. Only in the last twenty minutes does the film arrive at Halloween, and the only Halloween-themed moment is when the main character gives candy to some trick or treaters.
I guess if you love the lowest of the low nonsense Troma puts out these days you might appreciate parts of this film. After an opening scene of a witch being chased through the woods by her husband and killed back in colonial times, we meet Larry and his wife…played by a man. The drag shtick doesn’t make this funny, and there’s no point in having a male play the role other than the immediate move to fart and shit humor, which I imagine plays into the heterosexual male mindset that fart and shit humor can only revolve around men…even men in dresses.
As if bowel humor isn’t enough, the nasty wife then goes and uses a shovel to kill a dog that poops on their lawn.
Anyway, what follows is over an hour of filler as Larry does random day-to-day shit. He also has a few nightmares about the witch and daydreams about killing his wife.
Eventually the wife disappears from the picture. A big bear of a neighbor suspects Larry killed her and calls in a pretty boy detective who gives good man spread.
With 20 minutes left, the neighbor kidnaps Larry on Halloween to torture him until he tells the truth about the wife.
In an odd twist—and in a very low budget way—the film becomes a sort of funny and campy horror comedy for a brief period as the wife returns, possessed by the witch, and chases the three leading men (Larry, neighbor, detective) around the house.
SLASHFM (2022)
This horror anthology opens with a total seasonal vibe featuring Halloween and autumn clips.
The wraparound is simply a voice-over of a radio station host, who mentions there were a series of mass murders in the town between Halloween and Christmas and the killer was never caught…which sounds like the perfect intro to a series of stories covering Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Instead, this becomes an anthology of unrelated tales, only the first of which takes place on Halloween. However, the majority of these stories rock, and are definitely fun for a night of frights. Here’s the breakdown:
1st story – a kid watching Vincent Price in The House on Haunted Hill on Halloween night must contend with a masked killer that comes to his door.
2nd story – in this perfectly campy tale, a successful female accountant—who also happens to be a serial killer—falls for the hot mailroom boy in her office and decides to shower him with gifts she gets off her victims.
3rd story – a speed dating session with a deformed man offers a twist on the idea that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.
4th story – this was my least favorite story (not much energy), and concerns an Uber driver looking for a victim to kill.
5th story – this is a trippy, artsy short exploring the horror of being trapped in an elevator with a stranger.
6th story – this is a funny creature feature about a leading man who is just as scared of cats as he is of the pig lizard creature coming for him and his friends.
7th story – this is the best fully frightening tale of the bunch, and involves a young woman with psychological problems who sees her boyfriend’s mother as a freaky demon.
SISTER KRAMPUS (2022)
Running only 65 minutes long, this is a silly Polonia production that offers a basic plot, minimal characters, and simple effects.
It begins during World War II, when a nun is banished from her convent because American soldiers gang-banged her on Christmas. Krampus, in a fairly extravagant mask, gets revenge for her by killing all the soldiers and then…making her his bride? That’s why this is a Polonia movie.
In modern day Europe, two sisters on a trip (and wearing Santa hats so we know it’s Christmas) spend a lot of time talking to a few local women about the Krampus legend after witnessing some sort of ritual taking place in the woods.
Before long, a nun possessed by Krampus is terrorizing the sisters and their new female friends with the help of a dead American World War II zombie soldier.
It’s cheesy and low budget, plus it suddenly shifts to a weird comedic tone when the girls finally meet the real Krampus.
THE FRIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS (2020)
This is another “holiday horror” anthology in which only the wraparound focuses on the spirit of the season. Not unlike anthology The Christmas Tapes, which I covered recently, it features a psycho interrupting a family’s Christmas festivities to tell them scary stories using a videotape. In this case the uninvited guess is a guy in a Santa suit, and he’s the highlight of this whole movie. He is quite funny and even indulges in some homo-esque interactions with the men of the family.
As for the tales, this is where there’s a major problem. None of the segments feels complete. Every story seems to get cut short with no solid conclusion or zinger ending. This issue makes the movie virtually pointless to watch.
Anyway, here is the general breakdown of what each story was trying to be:
1st – a take on the classic urban legend of a hook hand killer stalking a couple parked in their car.
2nd – a priest is haunted by a decrepit woman ghost that wants something from him.
3rd – a babysitter receives ominous calls on a corded phone the family doesn’t use anymore.
4th – something (we never get to see) is killing livestock.
5th – a hot ranch hand starts dying of a broken heart when the girl he loves is sent away by her father.
6th – two guys at a cabin in the woods are terrorized by a weird, zombie-like guy. This is my favorite tale due to the fact that the guys fail to behave all macho like guys usually do in horror movies.
7th – a kid agrees to stay overnight in a house that’s supposedly haunted.
8th story – weird gross out tale of a corpse that wants its missing toe back.
EASTER BUNNY MASSACRE: THE BLOODY TRAIL (2022)
I’ll make this brief. This is a sequel to Easter Bunny Massacre but mostly seems to have no connection to the first movie.
It blatantly “borrows” from Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
It only differs in that the killer wears a bunny suit…and because it lacks any scares, gore, or intense kill scenes.
So why did I find it worth watching? There’s a gay kiss and gay storyline that comes in just when you least expect it. However, you’ll have to watch almost the whole movie to get to the good gay stuff, which lands this one on the does the gay guy die? page.
The other fun aspect is that the killer motivation is related to the events in the first movie, provided you make it to the part that makes that obvious.
EASTER HOLOCAUST (2020)
I can’t even wrap my head around the fact that a low budget indie director decided to make a killer Easter bunny flick 2 hours and 16 minutes long. How do these creators, who I assume are huge fans of horror, not see that a majority of even the most successful slashers they love run only about 90 minutes long? Oh yeah—this is a slasher, despite the title making it sound like some sort of zombie apocalypse movie.
With the running time burdening any chances of reasonable pacing, the movie also strays away from the basic plot (killer in an Easter bunny costume) to draw us into messy hillbilly drama with crude, Troma-esque “humor”.
If the film weren’t weighed down by all the pointless white trash shenanigans, it could have focused more on the sloppy horror elements…the killer Easter bunny and a cannibalistic backwoods family with a crazy mom, redneck dad, pre-op trans daughter, a slow son, and a woman they keep chained up.
After 90 minutes (the length the whole movie should have been) the bunny finally comes out to play.
It even disintegrates a woman’s face with acid puke. Apparently it has this ability because it’s supposed to be from another dimension.
Cool plot element—it’s up to a lesbian to stop the madness and close the portal to trap the bunny inside.
Really, despite the amateurish execution, if the screenplay had been streamlined, there may have been some redeeming value for fans of psycho backwoods family movies.
