Red Christmas

 Here we go: The worst movie I've written up yet. A nasty, dumb, ugly slasher I hoped would be good because I'm usually a fan of antipodean horror. You're in the shitlist for this one, Australia.

 Writer/director Craig Anderson comes up with one excellent 'finger up the ass' premise for a slasher movie: The slasher is the protagonist's (Dee Wallace!) survivor-of-an-abortion son, come twenty years later one Christmas day to confront her. Why don't you love me, mummy?

 To make things extra-fun, on the day of her abortion the clinic was bombed (is that even a thing in Australia?) and the one responsible for taking the still-living fetus home and raising him was the terrorist himself.

 Oh, and the killer ex-fetus is named Cletus. He's got Down Syndrome. Har di har.

...Damn, this shot makes the movie seem way more fun than it is.

 In case things weren't already set up for maximum discomfort, the family he's slashing at is a sort of rainbow of hot button demographics: There's a priest, his uptight, humorless, very religious wife, a man with down syndrome, two liberal dope-smoking dipshits, and a fucking insufferable smartass who's also extremely pregnant. Oh, and an adopted girl that's set up to fool you into thinking she'll be a final girl, I think, but she barely registers.

 Some effort is spent making at least some of the characters... if not likeable, at least a little fleshed out. But they're up to all sorts of stupid shit even before the killings start, and as soon as the (mercifully short) first act is done and the first family member is split in two with a single axe stroke, their idiocy ramps up exponentially.

 Once he starts his rampage, the killer appears and disappears arbitrarily, his competence as a slasher varying wildly as the script dictates. The less said of his victims' attempts at survival, the better; most of the scurrying around feels like a waste of time until someone gets killed; no clever plans, no decent action, nothing of interest.
 Mom gets to be the straight character, the one that's reasonable and the target for all the emotional abuse the movie throws. Wallace does an excellent job of making her seem like a rounded human being, but the script is so manipulative and, well, fucking dumb that somewhere around the middle I just started rooting for even her to die so the movie could be over and done with.

 Aside from the knowing quality of the setup, the slasher's name, a couple lines and some asshattery in the first act, this is not really a comedy; It's a supposedly brutal horror romp that kills off characters we're expected to come to care about. Well, that's a bust, as their general unlikability, coupled with the amount of stupid decisions they make plus the laughably manipulative script mean that all the drawn-out suspense  scenes fall completely flat.
 Worst of all, the movie also unforgivably skimps on the gore department, leaving most kills to be implied or shown in very quick bursts. There's a couple of good deaths - a ridiculous blender-related incident, and a bear-trap-related injury, both of which somehow shed way more blood than someone being cut in half -  and some of the others have a good concept behind them. But they're so ineptly staged they don't even begin to compensate for the rest of this shit. Not all movies can have a good FX/makeup department, and that's fine. But... well, maybe don't do a gruesome-kill-heavy horror movie, then. You're going to make a film this tasteless, we want to see more than a couple jets of blood.

The actors are actually all right; it's the material that fails here. The film looks like ass, which is a problem with many of these low-budget deals, but unlike any good indie horror, there's no craft, sense of fun, no good ideas, or... anything, really, to uplift the whole thing. It sometimes works up a little bit of energy, but for most of its duration it's kind of a dreary slog.

 It's an artless, charmless, unfun bit of shit hoping that the empty provocation and bad taste at its core will dupe someone into thinking there's more to it. No such luck- it's bad even for shitty holiday (and abortion) exploitation horror standards. Keep well away.