Dir. Guile Branco (2024)
A family's lives spiral into chaos after a dinner with their insane matriarch.
Man, it's so wild to be reviewing Halloween movies already. The year has felt like its flown by, and yet here we are, seeing movies with Halloween in the title in the beginning of August. Today's offering is a ridiculously fun blend of witchcraft, murder, sadomasochism, and lots and lots of batshit insanity. Director Guile Branco uses a ton of great practical effects to tell the story of a family that is pushed to the brink by a crazy mother and an even crazier set of circumstances.
After Angela (Lynn Lowry) retires as a dancer, she begins to become a bit unhinged. She starts killing animals, eventually graduating to cutting her husband's finger off at a family dinner. Her daughter Karen (Julia Coulter) meets a new guy who puts on children's shows dressed as an inflatable dinosaur, and the pair consult a goth psychic to determine if their relationship will go anywhere. Angela works through her therapy by performing as a dominatrix for her therapist Dr. Park (Lou D'Amato), who owes money to a little person gangster. When Dr. Park is blackmailed with tapes of his trysts with his patient by his ex-fiancee, things go from insane to insane-ier as Angela tries to resolve her doctor's "work" problems with the help of her newfound mental illness.
That's just a smattering of the nuttiness that goes on inside A Halloween Feast. It's a balls-to-the-wall performance from Lowry, who leans full-on into her role as a cross between Nina in Black Swan and Annie Wilkes in Misery. the blood flows heavy and Lowry is more than up to the task, delivering a hilarious performance that holds absolutely nothing back. D'Amato gives his all as well, and every single member of this enormously dysfunctional family holds up their ends of the bargain too. A Halloween Feast is a whole lot of fun, and there's a lot to love here for genre fans.
There are a few shortcomings as well, of course. Some of the writing falls a little flat, though it does hit on the funny quite often. It's a little hard to follow at times, due largely to the fact that there's so much going on with each of the characters. It's an ensemble film, with a lot of interconnecting stories, and not all of them are fully developed. It's funny enough to get by even when it struggles, however, and some of the lines had me legitimately laughing out loud.
It's always nice to see someone like Lynn Lowry in another role that isn't just a paycheck, and she really shines in this one. She's horror royalty to a degree, and she knocks this one out of the park. All of the actors really are good, though, and while she's definitely the star, everyone in the cast is stellar. If you can tolerate a plot that heads in a lot of different directions at once, this one is super enjoyable. It's indie through and through, and I'm all for it.
Who this movie is for: Indie horror comedy fans, Practical effects lovers, Inappropriate psychiatrists
Bottom line: A Halloween Feast is a hell of a lot of fun, and it's also batshit crazy. There's lots of blood, some great performances from an ensemble cast, and while it struggles at times to maintain such a complicated plot, it's a knockout indie horror comedy that is a great addition to the genre. Lowry is a blast, delivering one of the most unhinged performances in recent memory.
