FrightFest Halloween review – Unholy Night
A first feature from director Michael Gabriele, who also co-wrote with Jef Burnham, this reworks a familiar concept in a fresh, distinctly Italian-American way.
Gino (Marc Bendavid), a paint salesman, turns up at his family’s suburban home to spend Christmas Eve with noisy, squabbling, traditionalist relations. He’s sneered at by his papa (Ron Lea) for cutting melon into cubes rather than slices and his mama (Ellen David) nags him to change out of his Hawaiian shirt into the nice one his Nonna gave him … then constantly needled for being a loser next to his overbearing realtor brother Franky (Olivier Renaud) and slinky-dressed businesswoman sister Angela (Cristina Rosato). His ex-girlfriend Rene (Shailene Garnett), who lives across the street and has never been acknowledged as his partner (no one mentions the obvious fact that she’s black), shows up and remembers inside a minute why she left in the first place. Then Nonna (Jacqueline Robbins) arrives, pleased to see that shirt on Gino and angry that her family have sold her house – not realising that she’s dead.
The town is suffering from a particularly Italian curse as the ‘ritornati’ show up for revenge, emotional closure or just to settle into the same rut. These zombies/possessees are violent and demonic at times but also revert to their old personalities and obsessions from life. Gino, a lifelong wimp, finally decides to be a hero and ventures out of the house to save Rene – which leads him to think he’s found a get-out clause in the curse. His scorned intimate knowledge of paint even comes in handy when a vital clue is the red spatters all over the zombies, who generally bleed black. Few living dead films have as much hugging, arguing and cooking as Unholy Night, which is also a spin on the Christmas splatter sub-genre. It leans mightily into stereotypes, most of which are at least funny, though there are a few deeper currents, showing up the darker aspects of familial folksiness. There are even a few quieter, eerie moments – and some nicely set-up late-film revelations.
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