Make a Halloween movie. Capture the essence of the season and make it count. There is a built-in and understood aesthetic to work with. Autumn is your color palette, your motif, your driving principle behind your plotting. There’s something special and signature about that time of year, when the veil is thinner, and there is youthful trickery afoot. There is so much to work with, it’s almost a shock when a movie uses it without any regard for theme or texture, when there is no formal consideration for what the holiday and the spooky season around it has to offer.
A Halloween Feast is a letdown because it narrowly fits the holiday. Halloween isn’t about having a feast really. Sure, there’s a slightly twisted feast that happens on a night that’s said to be Halloween in the movie, but it does not add any color to the subject or influence it in seemingly any way. It could be any given day of any given time of year and nothing would fundamentally change about the movie.
Guile Branco directs with clarity but without any surefooted design. There are overlapping fragments of stories that diverge and are well kept track of but then they never converge back together and tell a more meaningful holistic story.
What happens in A Halloween Feast is a family has a horrible dinner party on Halloween night. Cult horror actress Lynn Lowry — known for The Crazies (1973) and Shivers (1975) — is the family matriarch who spirals a normal family dinner into unforeseen chaos. Her character is domineering and having a total breakdown and the family will pay.
The movie oscillates around her orbit but does not find a satisfying anchor. There are side stories, with coffins and dinosaurs and sadomasochistic affairs, but none of it really adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Together, in fact, it feels like a flurry of partial ideas held together by duct tape, just hoping that combining these random stray ideas together counts as having a complete idea, but it never really does.
At an hour and a half, A Halloween Feast already feels brutally long, which is rough sledding for a genre movie that should be breezy fun. The plotting never quite finds its center and while everyone is trying and the result shows the movie is made by a capable team, they simply miss the seasonal mark and do not solidify any of the ideas as especially fit for Halloween. A near miss at capturing a chaotic family dynamic and tying in some seasonal vibes.