Review of Tales of Halloween (2015) by Joe A — 16 Oct 2015

Tales Of Halloween is an amusing anthology flick that has ten stories told by ten different directors with the obvious reoccurring theme of Halloween. The stories are loosely connected by the presence of Adrienne Barbeau as a DJ, much like her Stevie Wayne character from The Fog and some shared characters.

Created by filmmaker Axelle Carolyn, this is a good idea that disappointingly has only four out of the ten stories really being successful. The tone of the stories vary with some being goofy like Mike Mendez' fun Friday The 31st, which has a Jason-like killer squaring off with an alien who possesses the body of one of his victim's and Carolyn's own creepy Grim Grinning Ghost, which has a woman crossing paths with an urban legend. Those two hit their marks, though the best stories are the opening and closing tales. Dave Parker's Sweet Tooth, begins the anthology and is another urban legend centric story of a boy that took his love for Halloween candy to a ghoulish level. The closer, Neil Marshall's Bad Seed, is a fun and gruesome story about a murderous jack-o-lantern. Darren Lynn Bousman's self-explanatory The Night Billy Raised Hell is moderately amusing, as is Lucky McKee's Ding Dong, about a strange couple. With unsettling Hansel and Gretel overtones and uncomfortable themes of spousal abuse and infertility, McKee's tale is the most bizarre one. Ryan Schifrin's The Ransom Of Rusty Rex is also somewhat amusing in it's tale of a Halloween kidnapping gone very wrong. On the epic fail side, we have Adam Gierasch's tale of murderous trick-or-treaters with a twist, Trick. It's crude and violent without being scary or funny. Paul Solet's tale of demonic revenge with a spaghetti western slant, The Weak and the Wicked, is just dull and has the least Halloween spirit while John Skipp and Andrew Kasch's tale of neighbors battling over competitive Halloween displays, This Means War, is just boring and predictable. Add that up and we have four stories that work really well, three that are pretty decent and three that basically fall flat. There are some nice homages along the way, the SPFX and make-up FX are pretty good and the visual style varies from filmmaker to filmmaker. It always has the look of Halloween, with jack-o-lanterns everywhere, even if the spirit isn't quite captured by the tale being told. This anthology's heart is in the ghoulish right place, though, if not completely successful in accomplishing it's overall goals.

The cast is rather large and even in the weaker episodes they seem to get the tone of the material and are having a good time. We have genre favorites like Lin Shaye, Adrienne Barbeau, Barbara Crampton, Lisa Marie, Caroline Williams and Clare Kramer. There are some veteran actors like Barry Bostwick and John Savage and director cameos such as John Landis, Stuart Gordon, Adam Green and Joe Dante. Then there are also familiar faces like Some Kind Of Hate's Grace Phipps, Cabin Fever's Cerina Vincent, Starry Eyes' Alex Essoe, scream queen Tiffany Shepis and Adrienne Curry as herself, to name a few. Overall a good cast that helps the stories a lot, even when they don't make the grade.

Tales Of Halloween is far from perfect and doesn't succeed as much as we'd like. The stories that work are worth watching for and the middle ground stories are amusing enough to check out, too. Even the failures aren't a complete waste of time and are short enough to be over mercifully quick. While not totally successful, it is a really good idea and hopefully next year, we get another and that one hits the ghoulish mark far more often. Not quite the Halloween classic hoped for, but when it hits it's stride it's ghoulish Halloween fun.