THE DAY AFTER HALLOWEEN
Directed by: Chad Ostrom
Starring: Danny Schluck, Brandon DeLany, Aimee Fogelman, Victoria Meade, Joe Lazenby
Long-time best friends Addison and Hayes awaken after their Halloween party to a house full of empty bottles and a dead girl in their bathtub - Hayes's girlfriend, to be exact. Neither have any idea what happened to her and must try and remember the drunken events of the night before…and consider what to do with the body…
The Day After Halloween is a very funny, irreverent film which starts very lo-fi but develops into something with a lot of visual flair and a very strong script.
Addison and Hayes (brilliant reference to Moonlighting) are two bickering, aimless best buds. Hayes inherited a large house which just happens to have a drive-in movie theater on its property, which he runs through the Spring and Summer. On this fateful morning, the pair wake up and discover the dead girlfriend (I don't think the film actually provides her with a name, the credits only call her The Corpse!).
I was just starting to think that this was going to be a very low budget, shot in one location kind of indie production. But then the credits start over a slow-mo montage of Hayes' gf arriving at the Drive In and it is wonderfully shot. You actually want to be there, in that moment.
This leads into some great work-place comedy between the various characters (the pumpkin design…) who are working at the Drive In and some of the customers. At first I thought Addison was just a complete slob, in a dirty old vest, but it later turns out he's wearing a John McClane costume (we even see that he's bandaged his foot) - which leads into a great gag referencing Die Hard With A Vengeance.
The film flits about in time, taking us back to when Hayes and gf met, to the night of the party, to years previously when Hayes had the bright idea of laying down plastic sheeting when throwing his Halloween parties. It’s a very dynamic way of developing the characters and set up some sight gags (such as the fate of Hayes' blue shirt). My only issue with this is that the countdown clock ticking down to the moment of gf's death is repeated so often it does become annoying after while.
The script's narrative plays hard and loose with reality, allowing the characters to slide into fantasy scenarios such as agreeing how to dispose of gf's corpse. This scene is shot in black and white and features both Addison and Hayes dressed head-to-toe in black, and feels like it belongs in a hard boiled crime film. Weirdly they keep these same, almost incriminating costumes when they fantasise about being interrogated by the police (detectives Shane and Black!).
The film builds to a satisfying but open-ended climax. Yes, we learn what actually happened to Hayes' gf but then the film spins out further, zinging out of nowhere into true horror territory, but with these two idiots having to deal with it.
THE VERDICT
Danny Schluck's script is a love-letter to horror and comedies with snappy banter. Its no wonder Moonlighting is a touchstone here. Addison and Hayes' characters have a similar dynamic to Clerks' Dante and Randall, and Shawn of the Dead's Shawn and Ed. The comedy is very funny and the film's visual style is very lively and varied. The only thing holding this back from a higher score is the over-use of the countdown which gets plastered on the screen all the time. We could have gauged the time jumps by the state of Hayes's haircuts…