So a few years ago someone recommended to me a Christmas horror anthology film with a title so generic, I immediately forgot it. Lo and behold, what surfaces in my streaming recommendations nearly ten years later? Well, I think this is the one, at least - the painfully generic title and time frame seem to confirm it. I remember a killer Santa came up in the conversation, too, though that hardly narrows things down.
Well... if it was this one, whoever it was that recommended it deserves a lump of coal.
It kicks off with the twin horrors of autotune and bargain bin CGI; The autotune is in the process of murdering the Carol of the Bells, a gag that was used to much better effect by some youtuber appropriating it for Portal (if you don't know it, look up the Carol of the Turrets - it's great). The lyrics are changed somewhat from the original, but not in a particularly fun or clever way. The title sequence ends on Santa on his North Pole base, all bloodied and being attacked by... something.
The movie then shifts to William Shatner as Dangerous Dan, a wholesome-ish but somehow also sleazy (or just Shatnery) radio DJ stuck broadcasting small talk and carols for the good folk of Bailey Downs. From there we're introduced to four stories that will intertwine throughout the rest of the film:
- Santa (George Buza) is beset by a zombie-like outbreak at his North Pole fortress, and has to deal with a small horde of foul-mouthed, murderous elves.
- A group of students break into their school on Christmas Eve to shoot a media class assignment about the murder of a couple that took place in a closed-off section of the facilities.
- A husband and wife notice that their son is acting like a wholly different person after he got momentarily lost in the woods.
- And an annoying dysfunctional family face off against Krampus.
The stories are... well, they're kind of OK, brought down by having too much filler, flat acting and even flatter filmmaking. A couple of the stories have potential on paper, but the way they're intercut tends to deflate any momentum they were developing - chances are that any given decent scene will be followed by one from a different story at a point where it's just treading water.
They're all connected, but don't expect said connections to mean anything - they don't illuminate anything, nor do they provide any sort of clever intersections between the four threads.
There is, however, some mild cleverness, at least one good jump scare, and a very decent (unguessable) twist for the Santa story. There's also a scene where a tiny kid molests his sleeping mother, which is the kind of actually disturbing, fucked-up shit this movie could use a whole lot more of. The climactic ghost for one of the other segments comes close, I guess, though it looked too silly to be scary.
Although most of the tales are played surprisingly straight, a cheesy, impish sense of humour runs throughout the film - especially the Santa thread, which even throws in a fairly hefty action sequence that's ruined by some duff shutter speed choices. Directors Grant Harvey, Steven Hoban and Brett Sullivan otherwise don't really do much visually to distinguish the film from any other middle-of-the-road VoD horror offering, other than to include some very crappy CGI for the exteriors of Santa's fortress. The gore fares a little bit better, with a lot of severed head prosthetics (or the same one used multiple times, as in an excellent gag in The Last Videostore). The Krampus here is also a fairly impressive creation for a movie of this budget.
I dunno; Maybe I'm being a little too harsh on a goofy, good-natured holiday-themed horror movie that puts in a respectable effort to deliver its genre goods. But to be brutally honest, it mostly didn't work for me - I found it a little bit of a chore to get through.
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