Polar

 Polar is a John-Wick-like Netflix production that came and went, like most Netflix stuff, without any fanfare or promotion back in 2019. Playing an assassin already legendary in the world of assassins this time is Mads Mikkelsen - codename: Black Kaiser.
 It's a shame that these movies copy everything off John Wick, but none of them have carried on the tradition of calling their protagonists after legendary witches. They could have called Mikkelsen's character Wicked Witch of the North. I'm sure that's probably why no one seemed to like it.

 Polar (I have no idea why it's called that; if it was explained, I missed it) distinguishes itself from the pack of John Wick clones by being a lot more tasteless than the rest, having a slightly more sedate pace, and to be honest, by not having all that great action.

 And by tasteless, I mean it absolutely wallows in being crass. It's a pretty sleazy movie: one of the first scenes fixates on the slowly deflating tentpole erection on a corpse; seems fitting that said corpse is played by Johnny Knoxville. The same team of assassins that killed that guy is later trying to kill a morbidly obese man, and they can't get through the neck fat as he struggles and throws food at them. A cute French Bulldog gets shot as a kind of funny joke/John Wick reference. It's that sort of movie.

 The premise is ridiculous and kind of funny: to keep its financial books in the green, a company that manages assassins decides to activate a clause where if one of their employed assassins dies, their pensions go back to the company. The way to activate it is by assassinating said assassins, of course. Might be just me, but that doesn't sound like a great long-term strategy... might not foster a lot of confidence in the assassins you send to kill the senior assassin employees. And of course, they didn't count on one of their assassins being so preternaturally good that he can assassinate the assassins sent to assassinate him, and a small army besides. Sorry, got carried away; Assassin is a fun word.

Ol' Kaiser is a couple of weeks off hitting fifty, the mandatory retirement age at his company, so his grotesque goblin of a  boss Blut (Matt Lucas, a British comedian I dislike whose main schtick is being cringeworthy) sends him off to kill a target in Minsk. Of course it's a trap, but in a clever move Kaiser kills the target just after formally accepting the job, so the ambush is foiled.

 Blut then sends the A-team after him, which takes a whole chunk of the movie as they track Kaiser via the information they got from his accountant. The A team are a bunch of young hotshots that dress in very tacky outfits and callously kill all witnesses. Not a great bunch of characters, but memorable, and the movie does a good job of making them hateable.

 Meanwhile Kaiser-let's start calling him by his name, Duncan, this is getting a little weird. Meanwhile Duncan, beginning his retirement on a small town in the American north (polar?) befriends his young neighbour Camille (Vanessa Hudgens), who's carrying some obvious damage around. I'm guessing this is why Netflix's stupid little blurb describes the film as " 'John Wick' meets 'The Professional' ".

 As you might expect, the storylines converge and the A-team try to take Duncan out in his cabin (with a honeypot trap that features highly acrobatic sex; Duncan is indeed good at everything.
 And that includes taking out teams of assassins. In a surprising move, the whole A-team except one is killed while we're still in the second act. So Duncan then needs to go face off against Blut and the rest of the organization (a bunch of faceless goons, booo) to save Camille. There's a few complications (a surprising amount of stuff happens during this movie), but things get resolved more or less as you'd expect.

 It's pretty comedic in tone, and the jokes are very hit or miss... I guess the good news is that some of them are pretty funny, then. The action is not great (very quick edits, and the moves are fairly basic - nothing approaching the grace or invention that we'd seen by then in the Wicks and Atomic Blonde). But director Jonas Åkerlund has been doing videos since forever, so it's pretty stylish; a lot of that style is unfortunately channeled towards the annoying 'in your face!' aforementioned crassness, but there are a lot of good bits too, and it always shows Mikkelsen in the most badass of lights possible, which is the correct approach in this sort of film.
 The soundtrack is pretty good, too, courtesy of Deadmau5.

 It's not a bad movie, exactly, but the story kind of deflates like that erection at the beginning, and the various resolutions end up being somewhat unsatisfying. There's way too much time spent with Hudgens character that doesn't seem to be going anywhere - nice character building moments, to be sure, but a bit extraneous - and when the twist arrives that finally makes sense of her character, it almost feels like an afterthought after she's been fridged for so long. I dunno, Mads Mikkelsen as John Wick deserved better than a forgettable Netflix #content catalog filler, but I wouldn't be against watching a sequel.

Brain Dead

 Not to be confused with Braindead, which has a lot more zombies and one more kung-fu priest.

 This is a mostly forgotten 1990 surrealistic thriller that I remembered liking, and it keeps up coming up in my streaming suggestions, so... why not? I liked it a lot less this time around, which is always a danger when you do this sort of thing, but even if it's not perfect it's got a lot to recommend it.

 The story behind it is pretty interesting: According to a TFH interview with Julia Corman (Roger Corman's wife), she asked a couple of interns to go through a room full of old scripts - a couple hundred's worth - to see if there was anything worth salvaging. The only one selected was Paranoia, an old script from the sixties written by Charles Beaumont of Twilight Zone fame (he wrote, among other TZ classics, Perchance to Dream; for Corman, he adapted Masque of the Red Death.) Corman had reviewed it in the eighties but discarded it as it seemed too dated. Along comes Adam Simon, and offers to rewrite it, pitching a corporate intrigue subplot to make it more modern. I have no idea if he offered to direct it as well, but it's interesting that he's written quite a few movies since, and directed only documentaries and shorts... except for a couple more Corman productions after this one (including Carnosaur!).

 Dr. Rex Martin (Bill Pullman) is a successful independent neurosurgeon and researcher who's contacted by his old friend Jim (played with maximum smarm by Bill Paxton) to try and recover some important knowledge from one Bill Halsey (Bud Cort).
 Hallsey, a mathematician, had been working on some critical numbers for Jim's corporation. Unfortunately, he went mad and murdered his family before he put down said numbers to paper. Dr. Martin balks at first - the treatment is highly experimental - and then balks again when Jim makes it clear that failure is an option... as long as the knowledge is then lost forever. This would be Adam Simon's addition to the script, then.

 Dr. Martin goes to meet with Hallsey, who is more far gone than you'd think; he believes he works for a mattress company, and that his boss is the one who murdered his family. He does agree to undertake the surgery, though.

 Oh, I'm sure this won't factor in anywhere, but as Dr. Martin is walking down the street with a brain in a jar under his arm, as neurologists usually do, he gets into an accident and smashes someone's windscreen in with his head.

 Wait, that's just a dream, haha, never mind. As I said, unimportant. The next day he performs the procedure on Hallsey in an operating theater off the side of a boardroom, with the full board in attendance (including George Kennedy, who as always looks to me like he just stepped out of the seventies, as the CEO).

 This operation scene is the highlight of the movie; Hallsey is awake during the open brain surgery, and has visions as Dr. Martin prods around in his brain and asks him questions. One of the visions is of his dead family, sitting on a beach as if for a family photo, but as they were when they died.

 It's not just that it's creepy as hell, but the film's sly sense of humor and weirdness are firing on all cylinders here; Dr. Martin's questions are voiced by the mother, and when people from the Board interrupt and start talking, their voices come from the children... much to Hallsey's bemusement. The fact that no one is aware of this except for Hallsey is just the cherry on top. Not coincidentally, this is the only bit I remembered of the movie.

 The operation seems to be a success, but as soon as it's done, Dr. Martin sees a man all in white, covered in blood, laughing at him - the one Hallsey has told him repeatedly has murdered his family.

 And that's just the start of his troubles. Reality soon starts shifting around poor Dr. Martin; He's tortured by insecurities (especially around his wife and Jim), his identity starts mingling with Hallsey's (I imagine this is what got him the role at Lost Highway), and then he starts waking up at the same psychiatric hospital where he met Hallsey.
 The Twilight Zone connection should make more sense now, since all this right up to the 'twist' ending could be a Twilight Zone episode... a very bloated one. Like in all good surrealism there are some neat narrative and symbolic threads running throughout things, but not nearly enough, and the action becomes kind of repetitive.

For a no-budget production, the cast is pretty impressive. Bill Pullman's obviously having a blast playing Dr. Martin as a goofy nerd; I'm not always a fan, but here he's a joy to watch. Bill Paxton does a mean douchebag, as always, and Bud Cort is also fun as a space cadet. The special effects are... well, they do what they can, but some look pretty bad, especially the prosthesis they use to simulate the open brain surgery. It's still a good-looking movie, with the director and the production designer (Catherine Hardwicke!) doing a pretty good job making everything look slightly off-kilter.

 And the script is great. I don't mean the plot, which honestly gets kind of boring after a bit, but the dialog, the tone- It's a very playful movie, merging corporate satire and (what I assume is) Beaumont's lovely old-school, dry dialog and surrealism... it might not all sit together very well, but it's pretty unique and often enjoyable. I'm glad I rewatched it.

Moonfall

  In director Roland Emmerich's new disasterpiece Moonfall, the moon comes so close to the earth that not only does it reach the stratosphere, it shears off a peak in the Rockies.

 Its gravity pulls off the tip of the Chrysler building and deposits it on the other side of the country (mostly intact, of course, so you can recognize it).

 Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached peak Emmerich; he's going to really struggle to top that.

 I'm struggling to find words to express just how dumb this movie is. Calling it an insult to your intelligence is an insult to insults to your intelligence.

 But it all comes to expectations in the end; It doesn't make sense to go watch the latest from one of the brains behind 2012 and Independence Day expecting anything but undiluted idiocy.

 I hadn't seen anything of his in more than a decade, but after watching Troll, which is pretty much a (very) slightly less dumb, Finnish version of a Roland Emmerich opus, I got curious what the man himself was up to. Spoilers: I didn't hate it!

 Things start out quietly enough: on a routine space shuttle mission, three astronauts run into an sentient inkblot of ferrofluid-like matter, which proceeds to attack them, blasting their electronics and leaving them stranded in the ionosphere. The astronauts are played by Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, and an unknown black actor- guess one which one dies? In any case, Berry is left unconscious and Wilson heroically brings the shuttle back to earth only with manual controls.

 You'd think to a hero's welcome, but in the Emmerichverse organizations and institutions are evil and corrupt, there to make things harder for the heroic individuals who actually get shit done- so the NASA turns on him and makes him a scapegoat.

 Ten years or so later Brian (Wilson's character) is almost destitute and estranged from his wife and son, which sets up the overtly familiar (pun not intended) and deeply deeply shitty drama that will ensue. We're also introduced to KC, a conspiracy theorist (John Bradley) who, just like real-life conspiracy nuts, is a loveable, cuddly teddy bear of an Englishman (he even talks like a kid's show presenter).
 KC's pet project is Dyson Spheres and other superstructures, which seems like a weird and very wholesome subject for a conspiracy theorist these days, but there you go. He's been gathering data and has discovered that the moon is going off its orbit, setting it on a collision course with earth.

 (Trigger warning - besides all the enabling of conspiracy-mindset bullshit , which of course turns out to be 100% correct, there are a couple of instances of Elon Musk being mentioned in near-orgasmic tones; SpaceX has a small part in saving the earth.)

 The NASA has also noticed the moon's inconstancy, but they're trying to cover things up because that's what institutions are for, right? they quickly put together a mission to the moon to see what's up, and what's up is that the moon now has a huge hole. When probed, the black ferrofluid blob (which, by the way, is a very unimaginative shorthand for nanobots) comes out and kills everyone.

 At the thirty minute mark the movie finally kicks into gear when a giant wave hits LA. That's... actually pretty efficient for this sort of  thing! From there the movie starts splicing its raison d'etre (splosions and buildings breaking) into its boring exposition and drama, which is a definite improvement.
 Things end up with another space mission with our three intrepid protagonists going to the moon and into it. Because, you see it was actually hollow, a Dyson sphere all along! Complete with a captive white dwarf star to power it! KC was right! (Never mind that the smallest known white dwarf is roughly the size of the moon; that's actually one of this movie's lesser liberties with basic science and physics)

 Meanwhile in the B-story, Brian's son takes an overland trek amidst the moon-caused apocalypse as he escorts Halle Berry's character's son (ugh!) to get to an underground shelter in Colorado; incredibly stupid things keep happening all around them.

 You have to shut off your brain at one point, not just to enjoy this, but to survive it; plausibility was never, ever even a minor concern for Emmerich, nor was letting minor details like basic physics get in the way of whatever hare-brain scene he's conceived. This is, if I haven't made myself clear by now, a really fucking dumb movie. However, the mostly CGI mayhem can sometimes be beautiful, as shots of the moon flying close to the earth often are here, and when the protagonists finally get an explanation for the lunatic goings-on, it's an unexpectedly ambitious (if still pretty dumb) slice of sci-fi.

 I expected a piece of shit, in other words, and got one, but... it's a fun piece of shit. It helps that it wasn't as disaster-porny as it looked, and had some other elements to it. Aside from the first half hour and a couple of dead spots later the pacing runs at a clip, which doesn't do wonders for the storytelling, but since the movie is what it is, it's no loss; at least it keeps things moving.
Low expectations were met. Huzzah, bah humbug, etcetera!

The Cleansing Hour

 Someone must like all the religious demonic possession movies - they keep coming out year after year, despite none of them being any good. An exorcism is inherently dramatic, sure, and the first two Exorcists were really good (so I like the second one; sue me) but it's a very limited formula that is extremely hard to get right, at least for it to be effective on non-believers.

 The Cleansing Hour, a clever, silly 2019 take on the sub-genre that makes it work by borrowing a trick familiar from the paranormal investigator movie handbook (what if a bunch of fakers suddenly run into the real thing?).

 Father Max is a failed priest that found a new calling performing exorcisms, which are streamed live to legions of fans over the world as a show called, of course, The Cleansing Hour. A hoax perpetrated by him, his childhood friend Drew (Kyle Gallner) and a small team who script the show, scout new potential subjects, and do the special effects. 

 Of course in reality Max is a self-serving douchebag who uses what little fame he has to sell merchandise and bed groupies, while Drew slaves behind the scenes to keep things together.

Monkeyturd123 drops some science.

 Their shenanigans have not gone unnoticed. One night the actress who's going to play the possessed victim doesn't make it to the show (she's late, as in dead, due to a demon-related mishap), so Drew convinces his beloved fiancée Lane (Alix Angelis) to be bound to a chair and play the part of a host to a demon for Max to exorcize.

 Only this time, a real spirit moves in to possess her, and makes his power immediately known by burning one of the team alive. How's that for entertainment? It then hands out a set of rules: Max must exorcise it by the end of the show, or Lane dies. Anyone try to leave the set dies. If the feed is cut, Lane dies.

 And then it proceeds to torture Max, both physically and psychologically, for the rest of the running time, while Drew tries to identify the demon so they can find the ritual to perform their first real exorcism.

 It gets... pretty silly. This is a movie where the view count or the network speed counts as a sort of McGyver's clock, with such riveting scenes as someone tracing cables to prevent his girlfriend from dying (this movie, you'll be shocked to hear, has no interest in showing any sort of realism its depiction of IT-related concerns), or a suspenseful shot of the view-count plummeting when things slow down. There's also a lot of heightened drama as the demon gets Drew and Max to confess their sins publicly - a whole lot of grimacing, shouting, and angst as their dirty little secrets and grievances come out.

 But it works because the actors are wholly committed to their parts (especially Angelis, who has to play the dual role of Lane/the demon, and switch between them at the drop of a hat) and the script, which has a good ear for fun dialog and a wicked sense of humor that's played as straight as possible.  Thankfully the film knows to play Max's mortification as a fun time and not as some redemption bullshit (even as people who are only complicit in his schemes suffer much worse fates, but hey.) There are some attempts to show a backstory for Max and Drew, which end up being predictably ridiculous, and develop their relationship a little; but the movie is definitely at its best when it's turning the screws on its characters.

 There's also some interest in figuring out just what it is that the demon wants; some late developments introduce some very welcome twists, including a couple of truly excellent monster effects. The action often spreads out to show people watching the stream, which helps keep locations a bit more varied and inject some humor, and as with this year's deadstream, it has a lot of fun with the chat messages from viewers and the cynical merch-pushing (All merchandise is officially approved by the Vatican!).

 It's a fun movie that knows exactly how ridiculous it is and plays it up with verve and conviction. Director Damian LeVeck and writer Aaron Horowitz expanded their 2016 short to make this feature-length, and while the bloat shows a little, it's still a great little slab of black humor and bloodshed.

Scare Package I & II

 The Scare Package movies are a couple of goofy movies consisting of a bunch of comedy skits tied together by a ridiculous framing device that is a little more involved than its name would imply - I'd say the framing device takes up about a third or more of each movie. Their main thing is being very meta, and all about horror.

 The first movie starts very promisingly. The first sketch is about the guy who's going around in the background of the horror movies we watch, making it so that scary things can happen: he changes the road signs so that the tourists go to the abandoned mental asylum,  he cuts the lights when the babysitters are home alone, he rents out the house with the obvious ghost to the unsuspecting couple...  you know, that sort of thing, but within the movie's reality. It's a fun, clever concept, and they manage to take it to some respectably ridiculous places.

 Then the framing device kicks in - it turns out this first sketch was somebody telling Chad, a video store owner about his idea for a movie (called, wait for it... 'Cold Open'). There's a new guy starting work at the store, so it's an excuse to show a couple more sketches - the second one is a doozy, a not particularly clever but very funny bit of mayhem about... Jesus, something about a weird lycanthrope and a serial killer going at it on a couple's retreat in the middle of the woods. It's a lot of fun, and boasts some pretty great gore.

 After that, unfortunately, it goes a bit downhill. The skits from there on range from merely ok to terrible, and the last forty minutes go back to the framing device, where the video store guy gets forcefully inducted into a sort of facility where scientists are studying an actual slasher. The slasher breaks free and starts murdering everyone, the good guys fall into horror 'types', with Chad the video store guy pointing out the tropes and shit. It's kind of fun, but it doesn't really have anything clever to say - all the ground it covers has already been covered, and better, a ton of times before.

 Now, humor of course is subjective, so I can see someone really enjoying this thing; on the other hand, a typical joke is someone getting graphically disembowelled and saying 'Owie'. So...

 All in all, I guess I'd describe it as 'cute'. You can turn it off after the first few skits, but the rest isn't that bad. I wish I could say the same about the sequel.

 Scare Package II: Rad Chad's Revenge is an absolute pile of crap I would steer anyone away from, even people who loved the first one. It's a fucking joyless slog that didn't make me laugh a single time. It looks a bit slicker than the first one, more assured, but the contents - including the gore, which is nowhere near as memorable as on the first one - are pretty cringeworthy. And while the first one was full of references, this one enshrines specific references as jokes. It's not quite as bad as a Friedman/Seltzer movie... wait, you know what? Yes, yes it is, exactly as bad. And I can think of no worse insult to a would-be-comedy.

 The only thing to recommend it is a British sketch that pastiches Re-Animator, Pet Cemetery and a couple other movies, but with pretty young kids as the protagonists and gets respectably gory. It's not great, but it's as good as it gets here, and gets a pretty good joke as the mom character says she's going to soundproof the basement for no reason.

 Oh, and there's a mildly funny spoof of Dr. Loomis in another sketch (that's itself a sequel to a sketch from the first movie.) And that's it. I've run out of nice things to say about this turd.

 

Cold Skin

 It's a shame Nietzsche is firmly in the public domain - His estate would be making a killing from all the quotations of his on movies and books, especially after the rise of nerd culture.

 Cold Skin, a Spanish/French coproduction from 2017, begins with one such quote - the one about monster hunters and the abyss, of course - and then moves on to some semi-profound philosophical musings as the camera slowly pans up from underwater to focus on a handsome Englishman (David Oakes) standing on the railing, looking out wistfully at the horizon and providing the novelistic narration.

 It's a period piece, too, set in 1914, the cinematography is sweeping and beautifully realized, and the orchestral soundtrack (excellent, by the way, from Víctor Reyes) is heavy on the string section. We clearly have a classy horror movie on our hands.

 The Englishman, whose real name we never get, is dropped off at a desolate volcanic island. As a result of some unspecified drama, he's decided to spend a year away from everything as a weather official on an insignificant speck of land away from any major shipping lanes. The only other person in the island is Gruner, the keeper of the nearby lighthouse (the redoubtable Ray Stevenson), who's basically a pricklier, way more misanthropic version of Willem Dafoe's turn as a lighthouse keeper.

 On the first night on the island, our intrepid anchorite is assaulted in his shack by a mob of humanoid fish monsters, which he only manages to evade by holing up in the cellar. The next morning, shaken, he goes to the lighthouse to get help and an explanation from Gruner... and he's kicked out and told to fend for himself.

 That doesn't go too well; he survives the next night, but only by burning his shack down (oops!). So the next day he stalks Gruner as he goes to fetch water, and discovers that he's got a female fish person following him around ('she's tame!', Gruner says).

 Gruner decides to call our Englishman 'Friend', and almost at gunpoint agrees to let him to shack up in the lighthouse... as long as he pulls his own weight. From then on every few nights the fishfolk come out and lay siege to the lighthouse, and Friend and Gruner defend it by killing as many of them as they can.

 The fishmen only come out on some nights, as they fear any lights. During the long days spent in the lighthouse, Friend starts befriending Gruner's fish woman pet, whom he decides to call Aneris (the sister and opposite of Eris in Greek mythology, but also mermaid in Spanish backwards).

 Oh, and He also finds out that Gruner is of course banging her.

 So it's a little like The Shape of Water, then, but a little more rapey, and it later even turns into a love triangle! Troy McLure would approve, damn ichthyophyliacs pushing their fishy fetishes on us, etc.

 For all of this movie's unpredictability, the full arc is easy to see once all the pieces are on the table. There's a lot of action as the war between the lighthouse keepers and the fishfolk escalates, and it's pretty well shot, with frequent splashes of CGI blood and later explosions, but because this is not an action movie, the fights are edited into an uncomfortable rhythm of short, regular shots.

 Nor is it really a horror movie, either. From what I could find it's a pretty faithful to the Catalunyan novel it's adapting, but the adaptation suffers because without access to the characters' interior dialogue the main thrust of the story - the evolution of these two as they realize that maybe they're perpetrating an atrocity - doesn't really have the impact it should. There is something lacking here; More development, maybe, or the protagonist being less passive/a bit less of a cypher. As it is the story means well, and is mostly successful, but ends up being a little unsatisfying.

 There are also some pretty glaring questions, the main one being if Aneris is indeed the one who's summoning the hordes of her kin from the sea (as Friend quickly points out), why doesn't she just escape? She has the full run of the island, and could easily jump into the sea and swim away.
 And also, why do fish women have tits? If they lactate, why don't they have nipples, or fishfolk lips, for that matter?

 The script does manage to get in some lovely details. I liked how Aneris puts rocks over things ('the fool's afraid they'll float away otherwise', Gruner explains) or the explanation of why there would be a lighthouse on a place no ships ever pass. There's some humor, and some weird touches I enjoyed. The writing overall is good, with a lovely maritime tone, and it's well acted, especially by the older hands.

 In the end the movie does earn the Nietzsche quote - it's literally what the movie is about! It gets off on a warning, though- next time maybe choose something that hasn't been run to the ground a thousand times over.

 Cold Skin is a bit of a weird one - I understand why it failed to make a splash, but it's a shame more people haven't seen it. It's a beautiful movie, with some truly great direction and cinematography (by Xavier Genz and Daniel Aranyó, respectively). It's engaging, well acted and even if it stumbles getting its points across, it sets its sights pretty high and hits at least some of its marks without coming across as a joyless slog.

Troll

 There are a lot of faults in this movie, but a misleading title isn't one of them.

 Building a tunnel through some Norwegian mountain, the fools done delved too greedily and too deep and woke up a hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall troll right out of Nordic folklore. What ensues is basically a Kaiju movie, with many of the classic Kaiju tropes, but unfortunately a whole lot of Ronald Emmerich-isms, too. Oh well.

 Our protagonist Nora (Ine Marie Wilmann) is first shown as a teen, as her father Tobias (Gard Eidsvold) regales her with troll legends. Twenty years later she's a successful paleontologist (of the sort that magically knows where bones are buried, finding a whole T-Rex skull as if it ain't no thang), and is contracted as an expert to figure out just what burst out of that tunnel.

 As is usual in this sort of film, she's the only one who can make out the troll in a blurry film taken at the site (using the arcane arts of rewind and pause). She doesn't want to admit to herself what it is, but she convinces the government to go pick her estranged dad up, whom we learn believed in trolls too damn hard and became some sort of Troll conspiracy theorist; a classic Emmerich touch which rarely adds anything worthwhile to any of his movies; Here, at the hands of someone who isn't a complete hack, it mixes in some likeable melodrama as the father/daughter relationship is repaired. In case you're wondering, yes, he turns out to be correct about everything despite being portrayed as a complete kook. The Emmerich is strong in this one.

 Nora soon gathers a group of like-minded individuals around her - an aide to the PM (Kim Falck) and a military captain (Mads Pettersen) who breaks protocol for them and accrues enough faults during the film for a court martial and umpteen dishonorable discharges, but who's counting? Not the movie, that's for sure; it later has a general basically give the thumbs up to high treason.

 The ragtag group watches on as the troll wades through ineffective military attacks, put together a hilariously daft plan (that almost works!), get fired from the government commission to stop the menace, and then go at it on their lonesome... There are no worthwhile surprises at any point as the script follows the standard Hollywood playbook for this sort of thing pretty damn close, including a stirring speech at a last stand, a government cover-up, a stupid and counterproductive plan from the powers-that-be, a crowd-pleasing stick it to the man moment, etc. etc. A whole mess of dumb, populist bullshit.

 It's kind of fun, for a while at least, and it looks pretty good with crisp cinematography, pretty clear action, and thankfully, good use of the sheer scale of the big bad. The Norwegian landscapes and folklore, great effects work, game performances, and the sheer batshit craziness of the premise almost give this enough energy to make it worthwhile... but by the third act an accumulation of weapons-grade stupid bring it crashing down to the ground (among many other things, you can bet that it steals and uses the "hackers are magic" chestnut from Hollywood).

 But even before that point it's hard to shake the feeling of a sort of compound deja-vu, that you've seen this movie several times before. Not necessarily better done, but not worse enough as to validate this one.

A Wounded Fawn

 A Wounded Fawn begins with someone recounting the Greek myth of the Erinyes - the Furies - as a statue portraying them hounding a man is sold at auction. A woman (Malin Barr) wins it in a heated bidding war, only to be murdered later that night and have the piece stolen by Bruce (Josh Ruben), one of the other bidders.

 We then cut to Meredith (Sarah Lind), a museum curator who's recovering from a long abusive relationship. She's decided to finally try her luck with another guy... who, of course turns out to be Bruce. I'm sorry, lady, that's some rotten luck. Did I mention he kills at the behest of a humanoid owl? Because he totally does. Anyhow; she's agreed to go with him to his cabin, and as soon as they meet we get our first jump scare as a surprise Doberman violently runs past her, a wonderfully giallo touch.

 During the long ride to the cabin, and later in it, Meredith starts picking up some warning flags from her beau (Lind's acting as she recognizes them and decides to play them down is really good), but, more importantly, as soon as they arrive at the cabin she gets hallucinations warning her to get the hell away.

 This whole section is beautifully put together, with the tension methodically ratcheting up as Meredith is progressively freaked out by the weirdness going on around her, and Bruce lets more and more cracks show in his façade.

 And then... something happens, and the movie enters Act II, which is where all the weird shit happens, and Bruce is, yes, accosted by the furies in enthusiastically surrealistic ways.

 I wish I could say I liked the movie. I was hooked for the duration of the first half, the more conventional bit, and was intrigued by the unexpected turn, but the movie completely lost me after that. I tend to like surrealism, but a lot of the imagery on display here didn't really do it for me, and while there are many mythological references, either I didn't get enough of the rest, or the movie really does get pretty random, so it wasn't fun to think about in the same way that, say, The Lighthouse is.

 Technically, it's kind of amazing. Director Travis Stevens captures the look and feel of 70's more arty (read: European) horror movies with an uncanny eye for detail, including the bright tone of arterial blood. The cinematography (by Ksusha Genenfeld) is incredible.
 It's also audacious as hell, but the risk with that is that if people are not engaging with what you're doing, it's going to seem ridiculous. You can guess which camp I fell in. This probably will reflect poorly on me, but I laughed at several points in the movie at some of the... more outré scenes. I mean, just look at this guy!

I like this one- it looks like a rejected Psycho Goreman character!

I feel a bit bad for making fun of something that'd probably be a whole lot better with more budget, but a lot of the problems are conceptual; I'm feel pretty comfortable with saying projections on flapping cloth will never be scary. 

 The main thing, though, is that I don't find what happens in the back half interesting. For a while there the movie felt gloriously unmoored, but then the only thing that happens is basically the only thing that could happen. That could have worked, but neither the ideas (except an interview-like conversation with Bruce) nor the visuals (except a really nice looking flapping tarp scene) did for me, so there you go.

Christmas Bloody Christmas

 Indie director Joe Begos has been on a bit of a roll lately. After starting out with some fun but pretty derivative 80's throwback films, he upped his game considerably with the impressive one-two punch of Bliss, a movie about an artist with an addictive personality and what happens when she's turned into a vampire, and VFW, a supremely badass take on Assault on Precinct 13 with a great cast of veteran character actors. Both pretty damn essential viewing, as far as I'm concerned.

 And now we get his take on the slasher genre, and a Christmas-themed one, no less. Ho Ho Ho!

 Pitched somewhere between Silent Night, Deadly Night and The Terminator, with a thick sprinkling of loud, brash, frank sex talk, it keeps Begos's penchant for moody eighties' stylistic choices, working-class characters, sparse, simple stories and abundant gore

 Going from the trailers I was afraid it was going to be a comedy - and it does start with a jokey set of cheesy TV ads, including one that acts as the premise for the movie: The US government built an extremely sophisticated, human-looking series of soldier robots, at least some of which were later repurposed by a private company to "fully replace your local degenerate mall Santa". So...
 a) ...what could possibly go wrong? And...
 b) ...OK. It's a stupid, stupid premise, but come on, that quote is very very funny. I'll allow it.
 Anyhow, thankfully those are the only real jokes in the movie. There is a lot of humor, but it's organic, character-driven, and it's dropped completely when needed. Very well managed.

 The action picks up as we're introduced to our protagonists, small-town indie record store owner Tori (Riley Dandy) and her long-time and long-suffering employee Robbie (Sam Delich). Their dialog is brash, horny, natural and very very funny, consisting of explicit sex talk, friendly ribbing and the type of hipster-ish banter you'd expect from young people who spend all their free time listening to music and watching movies. It turns out, young Tori has some hot takes on horror movie sequels, and is not afraid to deploy some deep knowledge of Pet Cemetery 2.
 Tori had a hot Christmas Tinder date all set up, but a horrified Robbie recognizes her prospective beau and manages to talk her out of that, and from there they go out on a booze-filled 'not a date' as he tries to talk her out of the rule she has against going out with employees. The back and forth is a bit abrasive but pacey, charming as hell -kind of sweet, even- and most importantly it got a few laughs from me.

 Unfortunately for any prospective hookup plans, one of the degenerate-mall-santa-displacing robots (Abraham Benrubi) is on display on a local toy store. And, wouldn't you know it, someone's set it to Evil.
 So it grabs a fireman's axe and off it goes on a festive murder rampage. No christmas-themed kills, though; it's all business. Things begin with isolated folks getting butchered in their homes/places of work, but soon it's going after Tory and Robbie, laying siege to a police station, and, well behaving like your regular hunter-killer unit.

 Poor Robosanta Plus PR people, they probably aren't going to get to enjoy a long holiday weekend.

 The film looks and feels great, with an eighties-inspired lurid color scheme that maybe is a bit overused these days, but that is generally justified by the script - green and red lighting for this scene? Well, it's because the house next door has a lot of Chrismas decorations up! It's even been commented on! And so on. And it gets an impressive mileage from its tiny budget - there's a lovely explosion/car crash, some great, disgusting gore, and some impressive puppet work as the robot starts falling apart, all lovingly rendered in practical effects and directed with an eye for impact.

 The cinematography might be a point of contention for some - it's overtly dark and grainy, even if it tends to light its characters well; I thought it gave the film the scuzzy quality it's going for, but it can be a bit much.

 Other than that, mark this down as another impressive indie horror outing from Begos and his team.

Avatar 2: The Way of Water

  I find it weird to talk about Avatar. "Yeah, it looks better than almost anything else out there, and the action is top-notch. It's just OK!"

 Given just how good the action and the effects are... how bad would the script need to be to kick it down that many notches? And yet... it's not that terrible. just hackneyed, overtly melodramatic, and uninteresting. But enough so that it kind of casts a pall on all the rest. There's nothing out there quite like the first Avatar, but its story makes you forget that.

 Thirteen years later comes a sequel that is even more visually impressive. And I mean it - it's absolutely stunning, a visual marvel. So how's the script this time around?

 It's... utter garbage.

 This time it's all about family. At the end of the first one, Sully had gone fully native, and in the span between these two movies, he's had three children of his own, adopted Sigourney Weaver's daughter(!) and all but adopted Spider, a human kid that was left behind as a baby when the humans were kicked out of Pandora. Who.. just so happens to be the son of the main antagonist on the first movie. Sigh; you can already hear the script creak as it's lining up contrivances.

 But we're just getting started. You see, said main antagonist has been cloned and his memories reimplanted, and he's been sent to Pandora as an well, not exactly an Avatar, but with a Na'vi body to hunt down Sully, I guess because the human military has correctly identified that without his guidance and plot armor the Na'vi are completely useless and would capitulate in half a minute. This contrivance I mind less because Hey! Free Stephen Lang!

 So anyhow, there's a full-scale invasion now, it's not just a mining operation - Earth is becoming uninhabitable, and Pandora is to be the new home for humanity. The ships arrive with loads of military and begin establishing a huge base, wantonly destroying the forest while the soundtrack goes for maximum tragedy. The war is on again, and the movie jumps forward a year.

 As in the first one, the only action that ever happens in this movie happens to Sully - and in this case, his family. So while his brood are out and about wandering in the forest, in the kind of astronomically implausible coincidences that happen way too often in these movies, they run straight into Lang's character, who tries to kidnap them but only manages to nab Spider.

 Sully, whose main priority is to protect his family, realizes they're hunting him, so he basically just drops everything and heads off to a faraway island chain to live with another tribe.

 As a narrative choice it's deeply unsatisfying, but since Cameron's passion for filming underwater is legendary, well, you better believe you're about to get your money's worth, and then some, of alien underwater flora and fauna.

 The water tribe accepts Sully and his family, with some shitty drama attached, but like in the first film, the Na'vi are largely relegated to the background, because this is Sully's (and his family's) story, baby.

 The script goes dormant for an hour or so while the kids start to adapt to their new environment, but the eye-candy is so good (and the story so unengaging) I didn't mind.

 Well, there's still dumb developments and contrivances - for example: because the force of Sully's sperm is so strong in them, you better believe one of his sons immediately captures the eye of yet another princess as soon as she sets eyes on him. This is shortly after a bit where she surfaces just like Ursula Andress in that one Bond film, by the way, which made me laugh. Cameron does have a sense of humor.

 After an hour of so of aimless wandering, something needs to happen, so the bad guys manage to finally track down Sully to his new digs. In a classic Avatar 2 logic moment, instead of taking a military detachment, They for some reason embed Lang's character and a small squad with a space whaler operation. Because of course. And so on- a lot of stupid happens, a lot of truly great action, there's a climactic confrontation (on which the Na'vi are conspicuously absent, despite lacking a valid plot reason to not be there) and the stage is set for Avatar 3, complete with a ridiculously cheesy/clichéd final shot.

 It's bad. It's really, really bad. I haven't even touched on all the obvious, really cheap manipulative shit that's pulled - like a storm breaking in the background on sad moments or as the bad guys torch a village, or a whale baby crying over her dead mother as the bad guys chuckle in the background. If I haven't made it clear so far, well, the storytelling here will metaphorically put its hand up your ass to the shoulder to try and pluck at your heartstrings. Crassly manipulative, possibly more than the first one.

 Ok, there are some nice things to say about the script; there's a line where it transitions from one bit where someone loses an arm to another scene in a control room where someone's, I imagine, trying to operate a crane and screams "the arm is not working!". That was funny. The moment to moment writing- dialog and conversations, are ok; I didn't care about any of the characters, but I didn't hate them either. And there are some recognizable themes beyond the very blunt (however right I think they might be) environmentalist concerns - I liked, for example, that the kids manage to teach the parents a thing or two.

 Of course there's a nasty mysticism over science bit of shit peddling, but hey, swings and turnabouts. 

 But -and this is a big but, I cannot lie- it looks so good you can honestly ignore all that. I may have laughed at a really stupid boy and his whale moment, or the nth moment when the bad guy seems to forget to use his hostages and position of superiority, but I enjoyed every second of those scenes. The action is crisp, clear, and full of holy shit! moments, the cinematography is superb and the environments are tactile and wonderfully designed. It's a flat-out beautiful movie, and that counts for a lot.

 It's got to, to make up for that script, and I'm happy to say it pulls both of their weight and then some.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

 It pains me to say it, but Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a movie produced by FunnyOrDie.com, with a lot of involvement from the man himself, really feels like a FunnyOrDie.com sketch put into a slowly inflating fat suit until it fills out a feature film. It's got some good jokes, some fun conceits and great performances... but it doesn't hold a light to the films it's inevitably going to be compared to. It's not going to dethrone UHF or any of Al's videos, is what I'm saying, much less Walk Hard- a movie that casts a looming shadow over any serious biopic, and especially any piss take on a musical biopic.

 

 And it really is a shame because Weird Al has been a background presence in my life since I was a kid, a genuinely funny artist whose goofy sense of humor probably has informed my personality in some way. Someone I'm always happy to see turn up wherever, and whose sensibility is all over this picture.

 So; what we have here is a parody of made-for-TV biopics in form and structure, applying the Hallmark Channel TV special histrionics and plot beats to a skewed, parallel reality where teens have polka parties and talk about accordionists as if they were rock stars. It follows Weird Al's story through all the common places - having to choose between his family and his art, breaking out and becoming a star too young, a descent into booze, a torrid affair, and... well, some other fun developments it'd be too mean to spoil.

 It's... pleasant, likeable. Yankovic is played by Daniel Radcliffe, who applies all the wide-eyed innocence of the role that put him on the map to make his character pretty damn endearing even when he's having a hissy fit. It's a great, fun performance that does a lot to hold the movie together even as it wanders aimlessly, ably aided by Evan Rachel Wood as Madonna and a host of comic actors in bit parts and supporting roles. 

 There are a few good jokes and solid punchlines here and there, but it feels as if a lot of the comedy here is to take these ridiculous situations or meta moments and film them in a dramatic fashion. That might be ok in a five-minute web short, but at a few points here it threatened to make this movie a chore to get through - it's a fine device to hang other stuff off of, but on its own it's clearly not as funny as the makers of this movie thought it would be. Commitment to the bit is not a replacement for actual jokes; You want laughs or groans, not a 'huh, that's kind of clever...'

Something in the Dirt

 Two strangers living in the same ratty apartment building - one a seemingly together (ex) math professor, the other one a slightly burnt-out bartender with a checkered past, discover that one of the apartments they're renting has frequent localized paranormal events. Basically, a crystal ashtray starts floating and emitting light.
 So they decide to make a documentary about it. And... there's not much more to the movie than that, except that there is. It's hard to talk about this movie without spoiling its weirdo appeal.

 That it's weird shouldn't surprise anybody who's seen any other movies from the team behind it. It's written, directed and stars Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (partly produced and edited by them as well; Moorhead was in charge of cinematography). But it is a little surprising just how weird it is. For all their bizarro ideas and wonky science, all their previous movies carefully incorporated Hollywood conventions and a clear narrative to at least try and make them more accessible.

 This is their prickliest, most internal and experimental film to date. Ostensibly a narrative feature, intercut with scenes from the documentary the characters are making, what it actually is becomes trickier to pin down as it becomes clear that they have been filming recreations of the events we've seen, and that we may be watching recreations of recreations.
 And it's complicated by, well, their complicated relationship. It's fraught from the beginning; Even though they hit it off initially, they're still strangers, and since the phenomena they're trying to document is in one of their rooms, there's a queasy thread of paranoia running throughout as the duo start fighting about the project.
 There's also the strange goings-on they're investigating, with a mess of weird concepts, coincidences and seemingly related factoids that start coming to light as they start digging deeper: from transdimensional emanations to Jack Parsons (!) and from there to Pythagorean Mystery Cults (!!). Not so much a single thread as a tangled web of conflicting pseudo-explanations.

Yes, the hanging Matryoshka dolls in the middle are thematic. Also, this is one of the rare scenes in the movie where the two characters are in the frame together.

 The investigation into the central mystery, then, is an exercise in futility by design. And ultimately... it's not what's important here. The characters themselves are, and most of the movie is about watching these two people who feel life hasn't served them right try to use this opportunity to make sense of  things, get lost in their personal interpretations of the event, and escalate the friction between their discordant personalities.
 It's often pretty funny, and (at least I found it to be) always engaging. The performances are fine, but the writing feels off sometimes, a little too artificial- a lot of times I could see what they were going for but it didn't really feel natural. Their theories to explain the paranormal stuff come off as superficial, too, so the 'mystery box' aspect of the movie isn't very compelling.
 And finally - and this is not really a complaint, per se, but it is something that may block enjoyment of the film: while a lot of stuff does happen, it doesn't, again by design, have a satisfactory ending or even a satisfactory trajectory if the movie's wavelength doesn't resonate with you. The movie is completely preoccupied with its own concerns, utterly absorbed in its own headspace... as befits the subject matter.

 But there's a lot to like here if you do find that you want to dig in. It all comes down (in my interpretation) to the rabbit holes we disappear into, what makes us want to go down them, and the degrees to which we refuse to come out, possibly shutting out or even hurting others. Timely.

 And if nothing else, we finally have a good companion piece to The Alchemist's Cookbook; Now that's a sentence I never really expected to write.

Pinocchio (2022) (Guillermo del Toro)

  When I was a kid I had a thick(ish) version of The Adventures of Pinocchio. I'd love to see it now, because from memory I'm pretty sure it was a condensation of Carlo Collodi's original, mixed with an off-brand remix of the Disney elements. The Cat and the Fox where in it, as well as a gorilla judge and a ton of incidents they would have never have time for in Disney's movie, but the cricket isn't a ghost, it's a whale that swallows Gepetto, and the final chase was pretty much taken from the movie as well.

 The 1940 adaptation of Pinocchio holds a strange place in the Disney canon. It's thorny, unconventional relic of when their films hadn't yet set into formula, and they were allowed to have a generous heaping of darkness. It's easy to see what's drawn countless filmmakers throughout the years to it, and Guillermo del Toro seems as good a candidate as any to put his own stamp on the material.

 His new stop-motion animated version of Pinocchio gives Pinocchio's creation a backstory: Gepetto  the carpenter (David Bradley) had a son, you see, a perfect and obedient boy who died in the first world war. As the second war looms, Gepetto is still a broken man, drunkenly crying over his son's grave until a benevolent, Ghibliesque forest spirit (Tilda Swinton) takes pity on the carpenter and gives life to one of his marionettes to be a new son (voiced by Gregory Mann).

 Gepetto's reaction is... naturalistic and not very enthusiastic, which gives the material a little bite - Pinocchio is born with nothing but love and adoration for his newly found father, but he's also a rambunctious, slightly amoral creature that immediately tests his father's patience and goodwill.
 It's a great setup that sets out themes that the movie will explore- Pinocchio is automatically and unfairly set to be forever compared to Gepetto's possibly idealized memories of his previous son, and there's an emphasis on how our actions can strain our relationships with those we love. His almost elemental nature also lends itself well to learning about compassion and about good and evil... yeah, it's a pretty clever twist on the original.

 Jiminy Cricket (Ewan McGregor) also makes an appearance, tasked by the wood sprite to be Pinocchio's conscience. In the original book (not the one I had as a kid) Pinocchio famously kills him with a hammer early on, after which he rises as a ghost to haunt the puppet with his counsel.
 As an aside, I would respect the fuck out of any version that stuck with this: if that isn't a brilliant representation of guilt making us want to be better people, I don't know what is.

 Here the cricket survives that but barely figures in the story, despite being the narrator; He's just a punching bag to be squished as comic relief, or there to explain a few teachable moments to his young charge. He does get the film's biggest laugh, though, with an impeccably timed instance of Liricus Interruptus.

 Once the busy introduction is out of the way, Pinocchio is free to start getting into trouble, first with a travelling circus, and then with the film's other big introduced DelToro-ism, the town's podestá (basically, a mayor appointed by Mussolini's regime, voiced by Ron Perlman) and the fascist establishment. The second world war is an active player here, letting the movie introduce a (very funny) caricature of Il Ducce (Tom Kenny, Spongebob hisself!) and a late-film stop at a brownshirt youth camp.
 Pinocchio's wild streak gets him separated from his family, with Gepetto and the Cricket hunting for him and having their own misadventures. Like all the other versions, this one is a bit episodic, but the script  (developed by DelToro and Patrick McHale, who was the driving force behind the beyond-excellent Over the Garden Wall) does a great job of establishing a narrative and thematic through-line as Pinocchio evolves and learns to balance duty, his conscience, and being faithful to himself.

 I did find the resolutions to the various threads a little underwhelming. One thing that often gets brought up about the Disney version (not necessarily as a problem) is that none of the villains get any comeuppance, which I think is brilliant and a surprisingly mature take. It might not make for a traditionally satisfying narrative, but it hammers home that what's important is what Pinocchio is taking away from the encounters with the various scumbags he runs across, not what happens to them.
 Del Toro and McHale seem to have taken exception with this, sadly, and the film makes a point of giving the bad guys what they deserve, resulting in some of the (to me) weakest moments in the film.

 It's easy to forgive, though, since the film otherwise manages to hit its themes hard and look stunningly beautiful at every turn. The analog nature of the project really gives it a tactility and luminosity characteristic of stop-motion; It lacks the purism of, say, Henry Sellick's work (the water here is digital, for example), but Del Toro's distinctive vision and the talented animation team make every scene a treat. It's a gorgeous, luscious world that they have created, and the movie would be worth watching just to get lost in it.

 There are a lot of songs, most of them catchy enough and with some humorously skewed lyrics, some  really outstanding character and monster design -Pinocchio's initially inhuman motion and a sphinx-like creature are standouts-  and there are some fun visual call-backs to The Devil's Backbone and others. This is not quite in the same league as those earlier films - it's overstuffed and the script doesn't quite make sense of all its disparate elements in as elegant a way as, say Pan's Labyrinth- but it's definitely Guillermo Del Toro's best movie since, and certainly one of his most beautiful.

Violent Night

  Hell, let's call it a Christmas miracle: Tommy Wirkola, who's been doing clever, likeable but not-quite-all-there Hollywood-adjacent genre work like Dead Snow and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, has finally hit it out of the park and made a very respectable Killer Santa movie.

 Only instead of taking its queues from, say, Silent Night, Deadly Night, it's an action comedy pastiche that pulls elements from a whole lot of influences.
 Die Hard towers over everything else, as well it should. There was a period after it came out when everyone joked that the elevator pitch for every other action movie was "Die Hard in a [blank]". This is absolutely, deliberately true here: "What if Die Hard but Santa?". But you also get a bunch of elements from other Christmas and action movies of yore, a generous helping of ultraviolence, and some random pulls from other movies the team watched and liked.

 Santa (David Harbour) is having doubts about humanity deserving a holiday like Christmas lately, what with all the ungrateful, cynical fucks out there. He still does his job, but he's an alcoholic, mumbling mess and he's seriously thinking of calling it quits.
 At the same time, a precious little moppet (Leah Brady) is spending Christmas with her family in a secluded mansion, caught in the middle of various shitstorms; Her parents are separated; Her father's family is a bunch of rich sociopaths straight out of Knives Out, grovelling at the feet of their matriarch (a very funny turn from Beverly D'Angelo); And, worst of all, that same Christmas eve a group of well-coordinated criminals targets the house, kills all the security and kidnaps the family, trying to get at a shitload of money hidden away in an underground vault.

Bah humbug

 You could say that Santa's the wrong guy at the wrong place at the wrong time. There's even a plot twist straight out of Die Hard 2 later on.
 Will Mr. Claus rise to the occasion and fight off the horde of criminals? Restore his Christmas spirit? Get that adorable moppet's parents back together?
 Well, yes, yes and of course. And that's this film's secret weapon: It plays its cards completely straight. It's got a lot of jokes -many of them quite good- and a lot of bloodshed, but these things never undermine what's effectively a very earnest, honest to god Christmas movie. It also carefully sets up its action so that when, say, someone tries to strangle Santa with a string of Christmas lights, you know exactly why he had his hand covering his throat. Props are carefully foreshadowed so that when Chekhov's woodchipper finally comes into play it's an extremely satisfying action beat. The script (by Pat Casey and Josh Miller, who were behind the recent Sonic movie) is very tightly constructed, and you can also see the fingerprints there of production company 87North, who have been churning out some of the best action movies of the last decade.

 So it's a bit surprising that the weak point here is the action itself - as mentioned, it's got great beats and very fun ideas, but unfortunately it isn't as fun to watch as other recent 87North joints. It's clear enough, if a bit dark, and well choreographed, but full of quick edits, slightly shaky, close-quarters shots, and non-martial artists doing the moves. I wouldn't complain that much except I had my hopes up given the distributor's pedigree.

 And yeah, David Harbour is excellent as Bad(ass) Santa. Very funny and believably scary when he's pissed off.

 Die Hard was and always will be essential viewing for the holiday season. I don't think Violent Night will ever reach that status -it's just not as good, which, well, is true of almost every other movie out there- but it's fiercely committed to being a better Christmas movie. It's got more holiday-themed killing and maiming than any three Christmas slashers put together; I think just about the only seasonal objects that weren't used as a murder weapons or factored in the action somehow were mistletoe, advent calendars and eggnog...
 Have to leave something for the sequel, I guess.