All The Creatures Were Stirring

 A five-short (plus wraparound) Christmas horror anthology - what could possibly go wrong?
 That's a rhetorical question, by the way. You don't have to answer that, All the Creatures Were Stirring has got you covered.

 The wraparound story is about a couple who go see the titular play in some sort of community theater, a terrible-looking performance-art-like piece where three bored-looking actors put on ridiculous looking pantomime of some common activity - each one transitions into one of the film's five segments. There's some fun in just how shitty the shows get, and how poorly the couple are treated by the theater staff, but other than that there's very little going on here.

 The first segment - "The Stockings were Hung" is one of those stories where some sort of evil mastermind traps a bunch of people in a room and tries to get them to kill each other. In this case it's a group of office drones at a company Christmas do. It's fun, for a little bit, until the character writing gets so ludicrous it completely breaks any possible immersion - one of those cases where you wonder if the writers ever saw how human beings actually interact, a copy of a copy of a copy of lazy horror tropes with no verisimilitude or grasp of psychology. It's bad, really bad.

 "Dash All Away" has a man (Matt Long) lock himself out of his car in a deserted parking lot - deserted except for a van with two slightly cultish-looking girls (Catherine Parker and Mekeda Deklet) whom he needs to engage to call his family and roadside assistance. It's the only short in the movie that manages to build some suspense, as the situation is very relatable and effectively creepy. It also has, when it arrives, a cool monster and a nicely bizarre explanation as to what's going on. High marks.

 After that high, we're due a couple of turds in the stocking. Specifically, a particularly shitty take on A Christmas Carol where the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future decide scrooge over an unfunny, angry loner (Jonathan Kite) in deeply underwhelming ways. It's a witless, poorly paced and absolutely uninteresting slog that takes way too long to do its thing and shuffle off the screen.
 It's followed by what's almost a throwaway joke, a story where a man runs down a reindeer in a country road to then be followed home by a mysterious assailant that lights everything around it red. It's a hilarious premise, but the next-to-zero production budget means that nothing is shown, completely buggering any chance it had to be a cool (and very funny) creature feature.
 What's interesting with this one is that directors Rebekah and David Ian McKendry go full on with the giallo and '70s Italian horror imagery, from the leather gloves that the man dons to manhandle the downed reindeer to some trippy, very cheap-looking photography-based visuals, to some of the editing and even a goblin-esque (on a budget) score. The short ends up being fucking dire, but it's got some interesting visual callbacks in a movie that otherwise looks pretty drab.

 Well, mostly drab. The last segment, In a Twinkle, is another highlight: Steve (Morgan Peter Brown) tells his girlfriend Gabby (Constance Wu) to not visit him for Christmas, as he prepares to chain himself to bed as a full moon shines outside his window. And then, just as he's about to lock himself in, Gabby, as well as three other friends, arrive for a surprise party.
 What seems like a straightforward lycanthropic (were-reindeer? elapusthropic?) premise fortunately takes a left turn into Twilight Zone territory, complete with an aspect ratio change, (very flat) black and white photography,  some overtly familiar musical stings, and sci-fi elements. Despite one major dangling thread, it ends up being a very cute, heartfelt Christmas story and it'd be a really great note to leave things on.

 But... no dice. We've still got the wraparound story to wrap up - or deflate, to put it more accurately, with a barely-there resolution. Only then are we finally done; It's some sort of achievement to make an eighty minute movie split into six stories that drag this much.

 So what we have here is an extremely uneven and almost aggressively unfunny horror comedy, one that offers at best some chuckles at the concepts on offer, but none at any of the actual jokes. The best segments take their ridiculous premises seriously, and are inventive and cool enough to work on their own terms and merit a recommendation- just maybe skip to Dash All Away and In A Twinkle unless you're a completist.

I Was a Simple Man

 "Maybe we don't deserve to... go so easily" someone says at the beginning of I Was a Simple Man, while discussing a botched suicide. Those words are spoken to the protagonist, Masao (Steve Iwamoto) and hang heavy over the rest of the movie.

 Set in Hawai'i, mostly in run down suburbs and back roads with the island's natural beauty in the background, the film calmly follows Masao in his daily routines and eases us slowly into his world. A widower grandfather of three with an uneasy, somewhat distant relationship with his sons, he lives alone with his regrets and grapples with the onset of an unspecified terminal disease.

 As his condition worsens first his daughter (Chanel Akiko Hirai), then a grandkid (Kanoa Goo) come to attend him and the film's point of view disassociates from Masao and starts tracking not just his family, but their memories, filling us in on the specifics of how this broken man failed his children, and later on, why. These memories don't just take the form of flashbacks; Early on the ghost of his wife Grace (Constance Wu) takes a permanent place by Masao's bedside.

 The cast, consisting mostly of unknown/TV actors (plus Constance Wu), is uniformly great, and so are the compositions (DP: Eunsoo Cho). There are a lot of elements I probably missed, as the film specifically addresses Japanese and Chinese Heritage in the island, and the island's induction into statehood (something also addressed by civilization receding on many of the flashbacks, and later as Masao's condition unravels and the jungle consumes his world).

Writer/director Christopher Makoto Yogi has crafted a beautiful, compassionate drama tinged at the edges with surrealist and supernatural, or more accurately spiritual, touches. It's a sedate, stately film with an almost Malikian appreciation of the natural world that builds to some very powerful scenes as the threads start melding into each other (in another Malik-like touch). The deliberate pacing and extremely melancholy tone may be a bit of a hurdle, but it's worth persevering. I liked this one a lot.