4 out of 5

Directed by: (…many people)

…As the opening intros ticked by, mentioned ten different vignettes for this hour and a half movie, I began to get a bit nervous: could the various directors really do their bits justice with such a short runtime?  I thought of some other anthology type films, sticking to the Halloween theme – Trick R’ Treat, of course, and Creepshow – and though opinions on those (including mine) can vary, they each have a mixed bag of offerings, despite more time per segment.  And then swinging the other way, you have 26 shorts competing in the ABCs of Death movies, wherein, again, some are good and occasionally great and some are not so good.  So what’s to conclude?  Well, that judging an anthology by how anthologized it is probably ain’t a consistent standard.

Thus I sat back, giggled at the milliseconds we see Adrienne Barbeau’s face in the cast before she begins narrating our tale as a radio announcer, and then set my eyes to watchin’.

Tales of Halloween does several things very well: 1. It gets right to the point in most of its vignettes.  While you’d think this is a consequence of that runtime, it’s always possible to do a “slowburn” short where the punchline – in a horror flick, the reveal – is your final shot.  Sure, a lot of these bits have a Tales From the Crypt conclusion, but that doesn’t prevent them from giving us some mayhem ASAP.  2. It doesn’t bother too much with anything to frame these stories.  They’re all happening on the same night thanks to some crossover characters, but no one’s trying super hard to work in an over-arcing thread.  It makes the movie a lot more fluid and fun.  3. It’s visually consistent from a production standpoint.  The whole shebang has a sort of drive-through quality to it.  That doesn’t mean the effects are cheap – for the most part they’re effective and inventive (see Lucky McKee’s oddball entry) – but ToH has a kitchen-sink feeling to it that actually helps the whole thing out.  The problem with anthologies in general is that they’re almost inevitably uneven due to more or less applied skill or better use of money / scope in a particular portion; for this film, you get the sense that everyone worked together, or were friends, even if that wasn’t the case.  Again: it heightens the experience, and makes me, as a viewer, less apt to sit in judgment of every detail.

Byyy the same token, some of these highlights wrap around to bite the film in the bum.  In the case of the framing narrative, it’s almost too loosey-goosey – there’s a character that I believe is supposed to be unique between two shorts but looks so similar and dresses so similar in both appearances that it’s unclear, which lends itself somewhat to the third point: that the effects, while totally doing-the-job, dispel some of the Shock! of the punchline when the story is over the top but the blood and guts aren’t.  This leads into a general complaint about the film, which is that it’s a bit too “friendly.”  I think it’s appropriately mean-spirited (Darren Lynn Bousman’s trick-r-treater gone wild is a hoot), but I do agree that some better gore or blocking could’ve gone a long way toward upping the funny / fright juxtaposition.

These are minor observations, though, that really only start to stack up by the 9th or so bit.  Otherwise, ToH has all of its energies funneled in the right direction to keep you glued to the screen, transfixed by the inane inventiveness of the majority of what you’re watching, and getting a gleeful, fun, campy kick out of the rest.