MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Tales of Halloween’ offers mixed bag of seasonal horrors

ANALYSIS/OPINION

The blessing and the curse of the anthology film is its variety of tone and subject — allowing for a smorgasbord of style and story from multiple filmmakers. And horror films are tricky business to begin with — typically the purview of splatter porn and often forgetting that the best terror is about creating and maintaing suspense in addition to the bloodletting (think “Halloween”). And getting 11 directors to make minifilms loosely connected is a historical filmmaking gamble whose rewards can be iffy at best (“Creepshow,” “Tales From the Darkside: The Movie,” “Twilight Zone: The Movie”).

So brace yourself, because here comes “Tales of Halloween,” an anthology that offers some genuine fun amid other tired bloody yarns as the annual costume bonanza that turns fear into sugar-coated joy is nearly upon us. Finding the gold among the riverbed sludge is what films like this are made for, and depending on how you feel about the search (and, of course, the product itself) will likely determine your own level of enjoyment. If gore’s your score, then be my guest. For more discerning horror fans, I offer you this primer.

A gruesome tale of a boy who takes brutal revenge upon those who keep Halloween candy from him and a youth taken under the wing of a devilish neighbor (naturally, the boy is dressed up as, well, you guessed it) begin the film. Message to adults: Skimp on candy and kids will kill you.

One can’t help but ponder at the formative years of the various directors as the kids not only slice and dice up horny teens and overbearing adults, but apply four-letter words in doing so, which this reviewer has always found to be far more offensive than any on-screen dismemberment could ever be. (I’m going to go out on a limb: Kids — and I mean those below the age of say 11 — swearing in movies is never funny and almost always done for a cheap giggle.) Add in the fact that kids and pets are about as likely to meet their doom in horror movies as virgins to be the first to meet their makers.

Too many of the early vignettes in “Tales of Halloween” pay far more mind to gore than scare, as the focus is on blood and guts versus abject horror (remember the old Rod Serling “Twilight Zone” stories and their twisted morals?). The tropes are there: car won’t start, don’t go walking alone lest dismemberment ensue, dropped door keys at the most inopportune of moments. Curiously, however, the gratuitous nudity, a veritable staple of necessity for the grindhouse genre, is absent, which either makes a case for progress or regression — I’m genuinely not sure which. Maybe ask Hugh Hefner — or maybe don’t since he recently decreed Playboy was going skin-free. What is this world coming to?

Lest I sound like the ubercrank, a few of the minifilms were genuinely creative and enjoyable, which again goes back to the — no pun intended — grab bag that is the anthology. Here’s what seriously caught my attention:

One of the more interesting tales was a dark-humored modern take on “Hansel and Gretel” called “Ding Dong,” directed by Lucky McKee (“May”). While the baroquely contemporary interpretation may seem as over-the-top, it is worth recalling that the original German folk tale involves a reclusive old bat living in a gingerbread house who bakes children into cookies. (How we ever survived childhood nightmares with tales like that is a mystery.) What I liked about this tome is that it didn’t take the material quite as seriously as the other auteurs of the anthology seem to, and aimed for a tone that was more in the vein of the comedy of the gruesomely absurd favored by such directors as Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillermo Del Toro with their parades of wounded grotesques. It’s worth hanging on for.

For my money, the best of the minifilms has victim becoming the hunter due to — and I’m not kidding here — an alien trick-or-treater in the appropriately tongue-in-cheekily entitled “Friday the 31st” from director Mike Mendez. After so many years of watching masked madman chase buxom victims who stumble and fall when they most would wish not to, it was refreshingly hilarious to see the tables turned as the maniac is pursued in turn by a sprightly young damsel suddenly possessed by otherworldly forces in a Roadrunner-pursuing-Coyote dynamic that was both humorous and genuinely subversive. The ending of the story, which I wouldn’t dream of ruining, provides the single biggest laugh of the entire film.

Tales of horror are more often than not self-reflexive, as if to prove yet again that there is little left to scare cynical audiences. As if to underscore such postmodernism, not less than three of the vignettes have characters watching George Romero’s original “Night of the Living Dead,” making the viewer long for the monster tales of yesteryore. (Keep your eyes peeled for “Carpenters” candy in nod to the director of “Halloween” and “The Thing.”) More levity humor would have been nice, but too many of the directors take the subject matter as serious melodrama — as if they forgot that part of the thrill of horror is the necessary gallows humor.

“Tales of Halloween,” like the act of trick-or-treating with Forrest Gump, is a pot luck experience of horror and joy depending on your personal proclivities. In this imperfect, but sometime-genuinely entertaining, romp, the best the directors have to offer are the humor of ludicrous terror. It also reminded me why short films can be so effective. Most who would likely see the film will enjoy it front to back, but old-school horror films like me are more picky for the chocolate nuggets among the pickled figs.