Tales of Halloween (2015)

Tales of Halloween (2015) has a bunch of ground to cover due to the number of directed stories involved, and Adrienne Barbeau, radio show for the city, is the narrator (inspired casting, no?). It gets right to it after introducing the directors and tales for which they are responsible for.

The budget is what it is. This isn’t exactly Trick ‘R Treat (which it might be coupled with in future October haunts) in terms of the production budget. I have read on Tales from others and it is a constant, it's relation to Trick 'R Treat (although there really isn't any similarity at all except the holiday they're set on)

The first tale deals with a kid being told by his sister and her boyfriend of a local boogeyman named Sweet Tooth who was never allowed by his parents to eat his candy despite the night of trick or treating he dedicated himself to in the homes of his neighborhood. Come to find out, his parents were the ones eating the candy (the mom is Caroline Williams, from Texas Chainsaw Massacre II) and pay a price for it. It comes down to eating his candy…his appetite is voracious. His parents learn of that the hard way when he takes his pent up frustrations and candy hunger out on them…and from them, literally. His notoriety spreads as a cautionary scary tale to frighten kids who eat too much candy, and Sweet Tooth, because this is an anthology in horror, does manifest himself in this uglied demonic form (with talons and pallid flesh). The kid’s sister and her boyfriend, you see, eat all his candy…so Sweet Tooth will visit them. Of course the parents come home and find their son standing in front of Sweet Tooth’s handiwork, believing he’s responsible (ludicrous in that he’s not covered in blood considering the mess Sweet Tooth left). **

The second tale has a warped twist which tells us that the actions of kids on four young adults isn’t just random violence for the sake of it. This starts with a girl in a witch costume stabbing the owner of the house, with his friends and wife scattering in panic to get him help, but when the remaining survivor doesn’t dial 9-1-1, and removes some grotesque images from her phone the twist is revealed...it seems that the four of them partake in a ghoulish hobby and the kids are exacting their revenge. This one has Tiffany Shepis as one of the adults (she is trying to get the vehicle started when she’s ambushed and victimized by the Children of the Suburbs) who isn’t getting out alive. **½

The third tale describes how you really prank on Halloween. A kid is told that if he doesn’t egg the house of a local man, a supposed tradition, it’ll be told around school he pees his pants (his sister’s boyfriend is a bit of a douchebag). When the kid’s about to do so due to the pressure, Barry Bostwick’s Satan supposedly shows him how it’s done. However, all is not what it seems as the one in the devil costume, accompanying the *real thing*, wreaks havoc in the town (a dentist handing out toothbrushes to kids due to how candy rots teeth gets a surprise, a liquor store owner is held up and others in the neighborhood also are treated to gunshots, ghost sheet decorations are gasolined and set on fire!) but the kid who attempted to egg Satan’s home will learn all too well how it feels to be the one pranked. **½

The forth tale is a bit hard to swallow due to how hot the lead villain is of a trio of thugs who torment innocents who trespass their area of a street. One *avenger*, with a reason to see them endure punishment, calls them out and is chased by them to a trailer home that was burned down with his parents inside of it…by the trio when they were kids on a Halloween night in costumes and face paint. When the trio believe they have this kid right where they want him, he’s got a trick of his own up his sleeve…a piece of paper with a character drawn on it has specific spells which summon a “demon of revenge”! Grace Phipps (and this isn’t a snide remark, but just how her and the character came off the screen) is simply too model-attractive to make the leader of a street gang credible. *½

The fifth tale is really a basic “spirit spoken of in ghost story shows up to surprise the daughter of a local eccentric on her couch”. Lynn Shaye is the mom of the victim, with director Mick Garris (dressed as the opera phantom), Barbara Crampton as a witch, and Stuart Gordon among the party guests. Shaye tells the story of the ghost that eventually stalks her daughter from behind while on the way home from the party. While Night of the Living Dead has been playing on the Telly for the duration of previous tales, this go-around, Carnival of Souls is on. **

The sixth tale is quite bizarre. It centers on a married couple during a night of Halloween, one of which is some sort of demon who slaps around her emasculated husband (Mark Senter of Jack Ketcham’s The Lost) because he can’t give her the child she’s always wanted. Trick or treaters are like a gushing wound to her. Senter later reveals that he purposely made sure she couldn’t have a sperm donor because of her monstrous nature. She proceeds to take advantage of the heated stove, and his favoring Gretel of the Hansel and Gretel story does him no favors…this turns that tale on its head due to her being dressed as a witch. Her mean streak and outbursts from human to demon (with multiple arms, red face, and sharp black talons) will probably be best remembered in this one.

Neighbors duel it out over who has the best décor in the yard: Morbid Manor against Dante’s Inferno. One is your basic cemetery setting with skeletons while the other goes for a bloodied, torn-apart torso aesthetic. Well, the spirit of competition (often a demonic spirit as it typically leads to tempers flaring and acting out in anger, resulting in irrational behavior) gets the better of them, and the two are at odds, physically duking it out when the loud music of the new neighbors disrupts the harmony of the old school lawn setting that has been synonymous with the neighborhood for twenty years. Soon a gathering of neighbors and trick or treating kids and parents are looking on with either great interest or rowdy celebration. Eventually it gets a bit too violent. One broken display leading to a protruding wooden stake leaves quite a shocked audience not expecting such a violent squabble over a contest of “who has the best decorated yard?” *

The next tale starts off like the ending of a slasher film with a girl in pig tails (???) and dress (a five year old would wear, looking kinkily skimpy on her) is running from a psychopath carrying a severed head in one hand and machete in the other. She enters this wooden workshop where dismembered bodies lay strewn throughout. We have obviously entered a slasher film where a Friday the 13^th reject (something close to the second film than the others) with a deformed face, mental deficiency, and farmer’s clothes has butchered a gaggle of Halloween party friends, on the verge of finishing off the final girl among them. What this guy doesn’t expect is a little alien (some cute claymation effects that I found endearing) looking for candy, emerging from a flying saucer overhead! When the killer gets frustrated when he can’t give the alien what it wants (all the alien can say is “trick or treat?”), he stomps on it, but it wants some candy, by golly, and won’t go away that easy. Possessing the body of the murdered girl, the alien is pissed off and looking for blood…don’t deny it the candy! Okay, this is something right out of the mind of a creative process looking to really stir things up with a slasher plot. Introduce an adorable alien creature that looks harmless and then, when denied its candy, turn it loose inside the dead body of a hot looking lady chasing after the killer (this is when it certainly takes on complete comedy) a splatter film emerges. Each character picks up the nearest weapon and body parts come off and blood spews. Guess who the victor is? This could be the tale that might be best remembered out of them all due to its absurdity. **½

A couple of crooks, normally robbing joints, decide to kidnap a millionaire’s kid and demand a ransom. The millionaire is played by none other than director John Landis. The hoods couldn’t imagine that this isn’t his kid…but some sort of pointy-eared demon (with a face I thought was very similar to Robert Duvall!), with a long slimy tongue, with quite the appetite! That's something quite revisited: the hunger on Halloween. They try to negotiate a ransom, but Landis isn’t interested! Haha. Even though this is played up simply for amusement, it does serve as the perfect punishment for two criminals looking to score easy money. The two trying to get rid of it, and not being able to, is one of those humorous attachment scenarios…as the hoods believe they have gotten rid of it, deciding a life of crime might not be such a good idea, doing so (the getting rid of demon part) isn’t so easy. **½

The town has gone to hell and the police department is exhausted (the captain, played by John Savage, of all people, swearing and anxious due to “every fucking Halloween, it’s the same thing…”) and on edge. This ties all the previous tales before it together…as the opening credits had shown through a type of visual map, areas of town make up each tale. The police force just seems ill equipped to deal with this next doozy…a killer jack-o’lantern, made right as the tale starts, just comes alive eating the head off its creator! Bizarre as this might be, the gutted pumpkin with the voracious appetite isn’t done chowing on some human grub! Oh, even though a cop and dental expert/impressionist (Pat Healy, Ti West’s The Innkeepers) are able to take the killer pumpkin down, they realize to their horror that a scientist (played by director Joe Dante) at a “pumpkin-producing facility” has harvested quite the *killer crop*. This is a fun bookend to a rather exhaustive accumulation of horror vignettes. So many compare this unfairly to Trick ‘R Treat, but I think this is more along the lines of VHS or ABCs of Death (the latter, to me) in terms of a series of stories loosely tied together by the framework of “a town gone to hell on Halloween”. Still, Kristina Klebe (Rob Zombie’s Halloween; Chillerama) is fun as the cop on the trail of the killer pumpkin, while director Adam Green getting a cameo as one of two cops smothered in chocolate after apprehending a killer kid (who ate a lot of candy…and his parents), and Cerina Vincent (looking hot as she always does) in a kitty cat costume finding her pumpkin-carving husband getting his head eaten off by his own creation. **½

Although you have ten directors (with the likes of Darren Lynn Bousman, Adam Gierasch, Neil Marshall, and Lucky McKee) involved, I couldn’t really tell a distinctive difference in the styles of any of the vignettes. Like ABCs of Death, the directors seemed boxed into a specific time frame for their stories, and I felt this rushed nature to each tale presented. I think the tone of the whole film, tale to tale, is a mixture of laughs and tension. But I felt that the tone just goes too far into the former than the latter. I wish the option would have been set for each director to take the material in whatever tone they desired. Maybe that was the case, but I just never felt that was the intention of the entire narrative. That is what sets this apart from ABCs of Death where the directors involved in each alphabet tale have a few minutes but can go wherever they want as long as they get it done within their allotted time frame.

However, while I didn’t come away from this with the desired emotional effect, the spirit of Halloween is alive and well in Tales of Halloween. I think the next installment should go crazy in the sense that the directors involved should have more freedom to bring more tension and apprehension to their tales if they so choose, instead of relying so much on comedy. I don’t might crazy black comedy or subject matter that is subversive, but I also like to be on the edge and have that gulp in the mouth…can’t say I ever had that here.