Horror Movie Review: Hallows Eve (2016)

Hallows Eve is a movie that is great at building anticipation. Unfortunately the eventual payoff is disappointing, plot-hole ridden & not as clever as it thinks it is.

The story surrounds the Hallows housing estate (it’s British thing) that has been left to rot. Anti-social behaviour is rife & a local gang rules the streets or at least they think they do. Leading up to Halloween night strange graffiti tags begin to appear declaring that the streets are going to be taken over.

The gang, not taking the tags too seriously, decide to break the curfew of Halloween night & meet this ‘new gang’ head on. If they want the streets of Hallows estate they’re going to have to fight for them.

However what they come up against is more terrifying & horrific then they could ever have expected. Or at least that’s what the film hopes you think. In the end it’s just one big let down as the ‘twist’ ending is obvious provided you pay attention to earlier scenes.

The first half of the movie does a good job of introducing the characters; the gang members & some of their families. It’s easy to sympathise with these people as their behaviour & attitude is so British. It would be made easier if the acting was better though. A few of these characters are embarrassingly portrayed coming across cheesy as hell.

At first it seems as though it’s because they really aren’t as ‘gang-like’ as they wish they were. That there is a tongue in cheek approach to the dialogue. Unfortunately as the movie goes on it becomes clear that this is actually the performances they’re going with.

Any slight amusing moments are completely dismissed as the tone turns darker & darker. The excitement for the ‘new gang’ reveal disappears as it’s rushed, focuses on one character only & spends almost the entire latter half in one boring location.

Characters that you spent 40 minutes learning about are killed off screen with only a brief flashback to fill in the blanks. Just so the most boring & exposition spouting character can get even more screen time.

The middle of this film is so boring. There is little tension because all you have is questions. Why would the gang not kill them all straight away? Why bring them to this building & then hunt them? It tries & fails to build tension by repeating several of the same ‘hide from the bad-guy, they almost found me but something else distracted them’ sequences.

What starts off sinister & creepy becomes laughable as the full picture is revealed. Instead of answering the questions you have it ends up raising even more. Nowhere as clever as it thinks it is.

The Halloween setting is also pretty pointless & seems to only have been used just so they could blow their budget on pumpkins.

A very disappointing watch considering the effort put in with building anticipation at the start. As dumb sounding as the characters are the film at least makes effort in building stories around them only to throw it all away.