Rating: C+
Dir: too many to name
Star: Barbara Crampton, Tiffany Shepis, Stephen E. de Souza
With hindsight, I should have started watching this anthology on December 1st, and done one short horror film per day, rather than it being one of the very last movies seen in 2023. For in style, it is designed as a cinematic Advent calendar, opening 24 doors into horror. We zoom around a CGI living room, accompanied by a very Harry Potter-esque score, focusing on various objects, each of which becomes the gateway to a segment. You’ll understand, given the number of parts, this becomes as much a test of stamina as anything. It runs for one hundred and forty-five minutes, though in mitigation, close to the last twenty are closing credits. In counter-mitigation, these are interrupted twice for bonus shorts, giving twenty-six in all.
The final number may be a nod to obvious inspiration, The ABCs of Death. Here, the remit provided to the film-makers appears to have been a festive one, to be realized in around five minutes, on a budget of five thousand Euros. That said, the variety and range of styles and approaches is undeniably impressive, although in some cases, the connection to Christmas definitely seems tangential at best. There are a few names you will recognize among the directors, including Ruggero Deodato. There are no cannibals to be found in his entry (top), but you can spot a poster of Cannibal Holocaust in the background. Lucky McKee and Pollyanna Macintosh are other participants, while Die Hard writer de Souza shows up in a Reservoir Dogs spoof, dryly titled Xmas on Fire.
It was one of my favourite segments: anything mocking Tarantino immediately makes my “nice” list. Other standouts included John Cook Lynch’s Crackers, which had both style and substance, as well as Michael Varrati’s All Sales Fatal, in which Shepis plays an entitled Christmas shopper, whose dispute with a store employee gets savage. This was one I’d like to have seen expanded, and the roughly five-minute limitation on running-time appears to have been a tough one. It is not easy to tell a complete story in such a short time-frame, and as a result, a good number of the entries came off as feeling rushed or incomplete. Often good ideas, just half-baked in execution.
On the other hand, we appreciate brevity, since it forces film-makers to get to the goddamn point [although a couple in this anthology still seem to have missed the memo!]. From watching submissions to FearCon, we know the struggle of sitting through entries where the maker feels the need to unfold things at feature-length pace, oblivious to short films being a different beast. Here, at least you know the bad entries will be gone soon enough, though if you can’t hold our attention for the time it takes to boil an egg, there’s an issue. However, the more parts your anthology has, the more likely it is to tend overall towards mediocrity. It’s a mathematical law, and with 26 entries here, any grade except c-plus was always going to be unlikely.