31 Days of Halloween October Horror Movie Challenge - Day 5: All Soul's Day (2014)

 

Day 5 - All Souls Day (2014) Borrowed from OverDrive. 

“Alicia: Was eternal life worth it?

Diaz: I think so.”

Another horror star-studded film that I had not been aware of previously. This one stars horror alums Jeffery Combs (Reanimator), Ellie Cornell (Halloween 4 and 5), David Keith (Firestarter), Danny Trejo (Just… everything. He’s in everything), and then there’s that kid that makes out with his sister from Eurotrip. In a sleepy Mexico town, Diaz (Trejo) sells the souls of his people for eternal life. But each year he must sacrifice the soul of a Mexican girl to appease the restless dead, or else they rise from the grave and run rampant through the town slaughtering all they can find and looking for Diaz. We see an example of this when years later a husband (Combs) and wife (Cornell) stop in the town on a road trip with their son and daughter. The dead take the family with the exception of the son, and years later (again) the son has grown up to be the new town sheriff (Keith) when another group of people, this time teens stopover in the town and find themselves facing off against the hordes of the damned. This one is kind of crazy and has some pretty good kills, though not as many as you might expect. It’s a different take on a zombie flick as the walking dead in this one don’t infect you, but if you die by their hands, you do still become one of them. The make-up effects weren’t great on the zombies, but the special effects on the kills were pretty great. It was very strange that the visual effects would be so well done, but that the makeup effects really looked phoned in. The opening and time jumps are a little weird, and not much is ever really explained beyond the very basic elements of the plot. We learn about Diaz's deal and why he's after eternal life, how the curse works, etc. Why the kid from the first time jump decides to watch his family get slaughtered and stay on in the town is never explained apart from just the fact that he's an ass, I guess. The college kids in the second time jump don't really provide much explanation for why they are meeting up in this town either other than it's on the way to their destination (which is weird that a town like this would even be on a map to plan on visiting specifically, after all the first family we saw just happened to come across it by chance). Overall though, it’s a pretty fun film and something a bit different in the way that it approaches zombies, and the Latin flair. I would recommend checking this one out for a little variety to your horror movie repertoire.

 Movie Count:

Movie Count:

New Movies = 3

Total Movies = 5

OverDrive Breakdown: OverDrive is a digital platform that you can use to borrow ebooks, audiobooks, comics, graphic novels, and movies. Unlike Hoopla, you can't download videos. They must be streamed. Also, you don't have the casting option. But both Hoopla and OverDrive can be accessed via web browser so you can watch on your computers. Another drawback is that you don't have unlimited access to videos, so if someone else has it borrowed, you do have to place a hold and wait for them to either return the material or for their loan to time out. Plus sides are the ease of borrowing. You have a set number of titles of any format (book, audio, video, etc.) that you can borrow from at any point in time (my library is set at ten), but once you return a title, you get that borrow back. So, unlike Hoopla, you don't have to wait for the next month to start borrowing again. Also, even if you have to place a hold, the longest loan period on a video is seven days, and then most videos expire 48 hours after you start watching, so the turnaround time is very quick. OverDrive will also email you notifications when your hold is ready.