All Hallows Eve: October 30th
by Ryan Byrne
There are few, if any, genres of film that have as much of an independent presence as horror. For every mainstream big-budget horror flick there's a ton of indie efforts, too many to count, or at least for me, I'm bad with numbers. There's always a struggle to set one's project apart from the legions of others out in the field and finding a niche is often essential in this endeavor. The concept of using the subject of filmmaking itself as an aspect of a horror film has been around for some time. Troma did it with wonderful results in '99 with Terror Firmer. Scream 3 dealt heavily with the filmmaking angle as did several other slasher projects I've enjoyed such as Killer Movie and Cut Throat.
The latest film I've seen in this tradition is Canadian film All Hallows Eve: October 30th. I recently reviewed a film called All Hallows' Eve 2 and feel the need to start off by pointing out that this movie has nothing to do with that film or its predecessor, All Hallows' Eve. Supposedly "inspired by true events" All Hallows Eve: October 30th began on October 29th 1988. The opening felt muddled to me and it was difficult to see how all the different elements fit together, but essentially a creeper in a van abducts a little girl after she finishes playing with his grandsons. The daughter of the creeper, the boys' mother, is some sort of witch and performs a séance separately, then the grandfather freaks out and attacks his daughter.
The bulk of the film took place 20 years later, on the same date. At this time we find Ethan (co-writer/director Ryan Byrne), one of the boys from the opening, desperately trying to film a movie in the woods, accompanied by a cast and crew. The film played out with the group trying to shoot their movie with very little interference. There was no consistent antagonist for the longest time and I often found it confusing as to what the danger was even supposed to be. About an hour into the film, bodies started piling up, letting me know that this is indeed a typical slasher style film, but I had no idea who I was even supposed to assume the killer was. Not in a mystery type of way as with the Scream series, just in the sense that I was lost.
There isn't much else to say plot-wise. The film essentially consisted of the cast and crew within the film bickering and then turning up smeared with mostly conservative amounts of blood, indicating they'd been killed. The deaths weren't even tied in all that well and ended up being nothing more than something that occurred every now and again with little story progression as a result.
I try to make a point not to bash a film mercilessly since I'm sure everyone worked hard on it and believed in the project. The only exception to this is when a film seems like it's gone out of its way to annoy me with boring awfulness and that wasn't the case with this one. All Hallows Eve: October 30th's biggest problem is that it couldn't seem to figure out what it was. It felt like someone put a bunch of different slasher elements into a blender and hit "frappe". There was the "Chatterbox hitchhiker talks to unseen, shady driver" sequence. Then there was the Crazy Larry-esque guy in the woods warning the filmmakers to leave.
None of these elements were able to stick and jive with the opening sequence and the film couldn't seem to make sense of itself. I get that Ethan's messed up from what happened to him 20 years ago at the start and so he was disturbed while making his movie, but part of that understanding is thanks to the brief synopsis of the movie I got off of IMDb and I don't know if I would have garnered that on my own. The other brother was thrown into the mix too, but that element also felt clumsy and mostly ignored. It's frustrating that in a movie where so much of the exposition was spoon-fed several seconds after introducing a character, it didn't bother to explain anything about the meat of what the audience actually needs to know.
There are some other issues. The acting quality dipped and rose here and there, as did the sound quality. The reactions of the characters often felt forced and regardless of personality I couldn't find it in myself to care too much about any of them. The dialogue often felt like improvisation coming from actors who absolutely are not ready for improv yet. The wording was often awkward as if those acting didn't know what to say so they just reiterated the same basic things. Plus, almost all the spoken words sounded dubbed. If I closed my eyes during the film it would sound like I was listening to a radio play. Don't get me wrong, I love radio dramas, but this is a movie and should have sounded more natural in matching the visuals on the screen.
It's not all bad, though. I wouldn't say I was bored at any point. I liked a lot of the soundtrack and some of the character interactions were fun enough. As long as a film isn't a chore to get through, I'll give it a pass and this one was safely in that territory, if only for the sparse but occasional hammy parts. I do, however, strongly I feel that the script needed a few more drafts to figure out what it was and how to smoothly convey its intention. After finishing the film I'm still not sure how to explain what happened, and not in a purposefully trippyJacob's Ladder sort of way. The movie simply got convoluted with all its own elements. It needed a better handle on emotional and story consistency before anyone turned on the camera.
The climax rambled on as if those involved were making it up as they went along and by this point I was pretty much done with it anyway. All in all the project wasn't good or bad enough to be especially enjoyable. Obviously good movies are fun and bad campy ones, at least to me, are as well. This one sort of settled in the middle where it did a lot wrong but without the hilarious results. It's my opinion that the film had problems understanding where it was going, but seeing as how there is some evidence on the web of the story being continued in some fashion by director Ryan Byrne, maybe the joke will be on me. I almost hope so, as I still feel like the beginning was tacked on from a different movie. It's not that the opening and the rest of the movie had nothing to do with each other, but after all was said and done, they didn't have nearly enough similarities in tone and story to warrant being in the same project.
I'm not instructing anyone to steer clear of All Hallows Eve: October 30th but I would warn against expecting any of it to make all that much sense. It flowed oddly and had the tendency of getting tripped up on its own overwrought plot points. But who knows? That might be your thing.
PJ Griffin, HMS