All Hallows' Eve

MOVIE #1,181 • 🍿🍿🍿 • 10.08.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! I am truly going to TRY to be as fair as possible to the Art the clown/Terrifier franchise. But straight-up torture porn is maybe my least favorite subgenre. If a film isn't doing anything other than attempting to be as shocking as possible, without a wink or shred of irony, then I'm out. I don't judge anyone for liking this stuff (go crazy if it's your thing!) but I find nothing of interest in it. So let's start with the precursor to the series, the first appearance of ole Art, 2013's All Hallows' Eve.

The film begins with a kid finding a black spine VHS tape in his trick or treat candy bag and it's a horror movie starring Art the clown who looks more like a mime than I thought he would. So we watch this movie within the movie and it's a plotless torture porn mess with the killer now to be revealed as some deformed monster with lots of other fucked up shit happening too (Satan himself even shows up!). Every once in awhile they cut back to the babysitter and the two kids watching this slop. The brother seems disturbingly into it while the sister and caretaker are rightfully reviled. The grownup switches it off when a pregnant women gets her fetus cut out of her belly.

Then the movie starts playing out like a conventional horror film with fake-out jump scares. The kids go to bed and the babysitter puts the tape on again for some reason. A new movie begins about a killer bug alien. It's in a much more traditional horror genre — well, accept for the actual alien who looks like this…


…but it's equally as uninteresting. even though that wiggly guy is pretty funny. I was at least relieved that this wasn't entirely a torture porn bonzana, which I assumed it would be. That short ends with the reveal of an Art the clown painting for no apparent reason.

All this is just a framing device for Leone to package three of his short films into an anthology feature with the interconnecting babysitter/VHS storyline. Things start to get creepy in that plotline but she goes back to the well one last time to watch the final short.

This one has what looks like a fake 16mm filter effect added in post that is incredibly bad and annoying. Art the clown gets caught smearing his shit on the walls of a gas station. Classic Art, right? A costume designer runs out of fuel and gets directions to New Yawk City from the attendant. He hears a noise and goes inside the building. When she goes to look for him she finds Art sawing off his head. This is what I feared the whole series would be. And it only gets worse from there. The girl briefly gets away from Art but eventually she gets her limbs and tits chopped off and dirty words carved into her body. Delightful!

Everything comes full circle back in the framing device as the tape starts playing a movie with the babysitter and Art and then she smashes the tape but then everything gets cloaked in the bad 16mm FX and she sees the dismembered heads of the two kids upstairs and then roll credits. I'll give this a 2 out of 10 because I feel I need to give myself the wiggle room for when this inevitably bottoms out (Terrifier 2 is almost 2 hours and 20 minutes long — god help me).

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,180 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,182 ⫸

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All Hallows' Eve is a 2013 American horror anthology film edited, written, and directed by Damien Leone, in his feature film directorial debut. The film is presented as a series of shorts that two children and their babysitter discover on an unmarked videotape on Halloween night, all of which feature a homicidal clown named Art the Clown. The film stars Katie Maguire, Catherine Callahan, Marie Maser, and Kayla Lian, with Mike Giannelli as Art the Clown. It incorporates footage from the 2008 short film The 9th Circle, as well as the 2011 short film Terrifier, both of which were also directed by Leone and featured Art the Clown. It was released on October 29, 2013.