All Hallows’ Eve – review

Director: Harry Sparks

Release date: 2005

Contains spoilers

Not to be confused with the more robust 2013 vehicle of the same name, All Hallows’ Eve is a portmanteau film in which a group of crazy kids get together each Halloween to tell scary stories. This then is the wraparound and each story is one of the shorts.

The in-portmanteau twist for this particular year was that the stories must involve the apartment they are sitting in. Not really a stretch as that just involves saying the protagonists of their tale lived there. However for the actual filmmakers it cut down on necessary locations I guess as did having the young folks double up as the characters in their tales.

fangs

It is the third story that we are interested in and it begins with a man, Wayne (Joseph D. Durbin), (apparently fully clothed) having sex with a naked woman, Mary (Daniela Glenn). Suddenly she is all fangy and bitey. He screams (for the record, like a girl) and legs it back to the apartment that he shares with girlfriend Peggy (Jessica Mayne). She is watching Nosferatu and his entrance, bleeding, reminds her of stories of Bloody Mary who would seduce men on the street, sleep with them, bite them and turn them.

feeling zombified

It is then time to protect Wayne from Mary – Peggy can forgive him for sleeping with her, she is just concerned about his being bitten and he does display some ever-so-fangy moments. Ultimately he is drawn to Mary, stumbling back to her in a stupefied and, dare I say it, zombified manner. The story was no more complex than that really and doesn’t warrant much more exploration.

Jessica Mayne as peggy

The film itself is amateurish. The photography washed out and the acting not brilliant – indeed I think Durbin gives the best in film performance as Wayne in the vampire segment. But, whilst he gives his best he cannot save the story from being below par. The other two stories are essentially “slasher”, though one has a gun not a knife and the other is essentially “a woman wronged”. The twist in both was obvious from ten miles out. All in all not brilliant but the score is for the vampire segment only and is bolstered by some cheeky moments of performance. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.