We Wish You A Merry Everything
Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Holidays.
In the immortal words of Bela Lugosi what music the children of the night make, turning the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival into my favorite playground at the fest. Happy times with horror friends! So it was with some consternation when I saw this year the fest has given us a smaller swing-set upon which to swing - there are only six films showing under the "Midnight" banner (and it's a stretchto label at least two of them as Horror).
But wait! This year's opening film of the Midnight program is Holidays, an anthology consisting of eight short films (each one about a different celebratory day of the calendar) by eight different directing and writing teams, so I suppose that doubles their numbers, in a way. We'll take what we can get.
And with Holidays what we get, as is the usual case with anthology films, is a mixed bag - some treats, some tricks, a couple of candied apples with razor wire wrapped around them, a detached finger or ten. Beginning with "Valentine's Day" (directed by the duo that brought us last year's terrific Starry Eyes) and spanning all the way to "New Year's Eve" (which was written by the Starry Eyes team as well, making them the only repeat offenders of the bunch) the film makes microcosmic the fetishization of rituals and rites so annually played out in scary storytelling; think Halloween, Friday the 13th, Silent Night Deadly Night, or Eli Roth's short film "Thanksgiving" -- for every day a bloodbath!
Truth be told there's only one true stinker in the bunch...