This is a collection of short stories (about 10 minutes each) of the following holidays: Valentine, St Patrick, Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Halloween, Christmas, and New Year's. I did enjoy a few of the stories sometimes thinking they would have been a better feature length film such as St. Patrick. I was least excited about Father's Day. Warning to religious folk, the Easter Bunny has the wounds of Jesus as the film combines the two tales. I am not sure why a cassette tape, even when old would pop and click like a record.The efforts seemed half-baked.Guide: F-word. Ample nudity in Mother's Day episode.

Horror anthologies are always a risky business. With multiple writers and directors, there's bound to be an inconsistency in quality throughout. At least with this, given that the shorts, all based on a different holiday, are consistently bad, there is a consistent level of quality throughout. Valentine: (2.5/5) A blatant Carrie rip-off with some dangling plot threads and a lack of explanation, but at least it gets the black comedy angle of the anthology right and has a clever ending. St Patrick's Day: (1/5) A laughably stupid dud in every sense. What were they thinking?Easter: (1.5/5) One good jump scare aside, this is tedious, tasteless and toothless. Mother's Day: (1/5) A terrible body horror short where pretty much nothing happens. Oh, and then just when something is happening, it ends. Father's Day: (3.5/5) A cleverly constructed and told short story which is arguably the best of the bunch in many ways, but it's still too open-ended and vague to satisfy. Halloween: (3.5/5) An effective, squirm-inducing dark comedy that is both amusing and uncomfortable, although it is complete nonsense. Christmas: (2.5/5) They had a great idea here... which they did absolutely nothing with and once again it ends just as it's starting to get interesting. New Year's Eve: (2.5/5) More formulaic stuff which is mildly entertaining but just too predictable. These films aren't scary, but they're not meant to be. They're meant to be dark, uncomfortable comedies. Sadly, the stories are weak and just lack any true meaning or point. I learnt something important in Film Studies: when you make a short film, the story should start when the film ends in a way. That's a good thing to remember if you're making a short film and that is basically what all these shorts do. But... don't forget to get the audience interested and actually give them enough information to leave them satisfied! Evidently, these writers and directors forgot that.4/10

Just like most celebrated chefs go out for straight-forward, juicy cheeseburgers, after a 12 hour shift, Holidays is what active filmmakers create in-between having to produce money making block buster films. This is self indulgent artistry, and not to be confused with a filmmaker's desire to placate the critics. I wasn't surprised to read so many negative reviews. Art is a matter of taste, and to me, this horror anthology, often tasteless, was still fairly fun to watch. No real spoilers here. Each holiday episode speaks for itself in terms of concept and execution. Valentine's Day: A young high school student with a unmistakable crush on her swim instructor. A very decent homage to Carrie (the original film). On a Creepy scale this ranked pretty high.St. Patrick's Day: A nice teacher who would like to have a baby but one of her students (a very strange little girl) has other plans. I felt like I'd seen plot device before. Nothing new here.Easter: This was my favorite segment, and in my opinion the most chilling of all. The Easter Bunny will never seem the same after watching this remarkable short story. Very high on the "don't watch this one alone" scale. Truly scary, weird, tense, way out there, and executed very nicely. Mother's Day: A ritualistic pregnancy theme steeped in the supernatural. Like St. Patrick's Day I felt that I'd seen this before.Father's Day: My second favorite segment, was subtle, gentle, and seriously visual. Probably the most thought-provoking film in the group. Filmed in the Salton Sea, Anthony Scott Burns story is perfectly haunting, and probably could be expanded into a full length feature film. Jocelin Donahue, as Carol, delivers a deeply touching performance. And yes, that's really Michael Gross on the tape player! The abrupt ending puzzled me, which, was probably intentional. I'd love to read how other viewers interpreted the ambiguous final scene.Halloween: The most anticipated segment directed by the fearless, often crude (except in sweet films like Chasing Amy), Kevin Smith. Should I mention it has "very little" to do with Halloween? It was cool to see Smith's daughter in an acting role.Christmas: Seth Green is wonderful in this very twisted story about gift giving at Christmas, and how things can go badly very quickly. Green is known for his hilarious improvisational performances, but this segment clearly wasn't meant to be fun, and what it delivers is painfully frightening! New Year's Eve: This short contained the most gore, probably too much for me, but it was watchable, and beyond what I had expected with a neatly executed twist ending! I understand that these type of eclectic productions won't garner a ton of positive reviews, but overall it's not difficult to enjoy Holidays. There's something there for everyone!

Using a celebratory holiday as the background for your horror film isn't a new technique. The most popular slasher film of all time is "Halloween," complete with trick or treaters and the teenaged screams of Jamie Lee Curtis. Many other lesser known, yet beloved, holiday features have been made, including "Santa's Slay," "New Year's Evil," and "ThanksKilling." In this vein comes a horror anthology film that celebrates the horror of the holiday season. The holidays in question include Father's Day, Mother's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Christmas, Halloween, New Year's Eve, Easter, and Valentine's Day.Those who will enjoy this film must love the grotesque and the weird. None of these movies are especially scary, because that doesn't seem to be the aim for these newbie directors. Some of the vignettes are spooky, like "Father's Day," and most of them are downright weird, like "Easter," and "St. Patrick's Day," but if you're going in thinking that there will be an emphasis on jump scares and low budget thrills, you are mistaken. Honestly, I enjoyed the creepy, grim realities of these holidays, but these films don't take themselves too seriously and they revel in their campiness. If you love movies like "Black Christmas," and "Silent Night, Deadly Night," this is definitely going to make you feel nostalgic for the fun of seventies psychological faire and eighties slashers.Though this is a film that I enjoyed, mostly for its unapologetic strangeness, it is not a good anthology. Some of these entries are so underwhelming, not only because they don't scare but because they don't know how to end. "Mother's Day," is an entry with an especially strong start a la "Rosemary's Baby," and then stumbles around until it ends predictably. "St. Patrick's Day," has, literally, the exact same themes, but ends in a comical (?) farce of Irish lore. Kevin Smith, the only large name attributed to this film, has an entry that stars his teenaged daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, as a cam worker bent on revenge on her pervy, rapist of a boss (played by Harley Morenstein of Epic Meal Time internet fame.)Anthology horror films are rarely good, but they act positively as a space for filmmakers to take a small amount of time to try and create the next great horror fiction. Horror is so often drawn out and ruined via contrived plots and repeat sequels, and seeing a simple idea condensed down can be its own reward. While there' definitely some uncomfortably terrible entries in this anthology, there are some particularly potential gems as well.