Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Reviews

All Hallows’ Eve, 2013

In this anthology series, Sarah (Katie Maguire) is babysitting Tia (Sydney Friehofer) and Timmy (Cole Mathewson) one Halloween night. After discovering a VHS tape in Timmy’s candy bag, the trio sits down to watch a bizarre anthology VHS tape consisting of footage of gruesome and otherworldly murders. Stringing the stories together is the menacing Art the Clown (Mike Gianelli), who may be more than just a fictional antagonist.

Special effects proficiency and a memorable villain give a bit of heft to this otherwise underwhelming, overfamiliar splatterfest.

There’s a thing that children do when they’re first learning to how to write: they take big chunks of books they like and sort of mush them together. This is basically the effect of All Hallows’ Eve. There’s enthusiasm and some technical proficiency on display, but the references feel like too much borrowing.

On the positive side, Sarah is a likable protagonist. (I suppose the kids aren’t terrible--at least by the standards of children in movies---but they don’t actually talk like kids and thus feel less real). In Art the Clown, creator Damien Leone stumbled on an instantly iconic villain, though he feels less impressive the more time you spend with him, culminating in a strange left-turn shocker moment that I found more puzzling than impactful.

My overall struggle with the film was simply with the unoriginal staging of the different sequences. One sequence does have a novel beginning with Art the Clown menacing a woman in an empty train station waiting room. But she is then literally transported into a rip-off/mish-mash of Creep and about four different Satanic cult films (I have one late 2000s film particularly in mind, but that would be too spoiler-y). The staging of all of these sequences is . . . fine. But outside of the character of Art, there’s nothing new here.

And now, yes, it’s the paragraph about the gendered nature of the violence. I guess this movie raises the question: does mimicking misogyny as an aesthetic and/or dangling misogyny out there to get a reaction out of people make you a misogynist? As Leone sat in a studio, lovingly building/disfiguring a woman’s naked and mutilated torso, did he even stop to think for a minute about why he found this visual so thrilling that he’d use it as the second biggest moment in the film? No? Because he doesn’t have to? Right. Anyway. Aside from just, you know, misogyny-yuck, you run into redundancy and overfamiliarity. The physical and sexual violence inflicted against women in this movie is too familiar. It feels like Leone watched certain movies and thought, “I could do that.” And then he did. What a character arc!

I think that if I hadn’t watched any horror, I would have found this more interesting. As it stands, the charm of the practical effects doesn’t offset the fact that the segments mostly retread the kind of horror content I find the most tedious.

Art reached his peak here, imo.

It's the only sequence in the movie that doesn't feel lifted from something else.

Imagine how great the whole franchise could have been if the only thing Art ever did was menace people with that horn.

I've been saying this for 10 years

The way I felt about All Hallow's Eve, which I did like when I first saw it, was that Art was a sort of peri-Evil osberver/trickster who sort of showed up when people were about to get into some bad business. That was how The 9th Circle played to me and it seemed to be setting up that very thing. And while I have since been reminded of how ugly that segment is, it has an effective feel. Then the second segment is just not good at all and the presence of Art is shoe-horned in very weakly. Then the third segment, Terrifier becomes interesting because now you're waiting for something else to get after the girls because that's how the film has played up til now, but now it's him, he's no longer sitting on the sidelines, he's the game.
Some of that seems interesting but then the third segment is just so nasty and hateful as we've discussed that it takes any pleasure I could have gotten out of it away and because he's the Big Bad in it (and is maybe the worst Bad in the movie) it takes a little of the fun out of the wraparound, which would have been the most interesting place to reveal him as a Bad in his own right. Like if he had remained an observer for all three segments but ends up being the killer in the wraparound, that would have worked really well.
Of course, the issue here is that this not really a film and Leone really had no plan beyond keeping Art as his own.
It is two distinct short-films, The 9th Circle and Terrifier, with a last-minute, made-up middle segment that isn't good, and they end up getting tied together in ways that don't totally work by the desire to release a feature-length film rather than let Art be used as one story in an anthology that isn't Leone's. He doesn't have a movie yet so he basically takes two short films he has, makes a third segment (the middle one that stongly doesn't feel like it belongs) and puts it in the middle, and makes the wraparound. Listening to him try to make it sound like he had a "cohesive" vision is actually kinda funny when it's held up against the facts of the production or even other interviews he's given. All Hallow's Eve really isn't a movie, it was a play by Leone took keep Art The Clown his own thing and not let it be part of someone else's thing. And it worked I guess, but, as a movie, All Hallow's Eve does not.