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.

Cujo

 It's always been a bit weird to me how people complain about Stephen King movie adaptations. There's been a few turkeys among them, sure - and the man himself is responsible for Maximum Overdrive. But their overall quality is still pretty damn high: The Shining, obviously, but also Christine, The Dead Zone, The Mangler (I'm willing to fight over this!), Carrie, The Mist, Stand By Me and a few more. That's one hell of a bunch of movies right there; Let's see John Grisham or Nicholas Sparks beat that.

 Cujo is not a movie that comes up often when King's movies are discussed, but I've always thought it's one of the good ones. It's the rare Stephen King adaptation that tries to show as much love as the author does for his characters, and that pays off beautifully once the domino chain of events results in a lady and her young child getting isolated and trapped in their car, under siege by a murderous Saint Bernard.

 The film takes its time to get there. First you need to know who that's gonna happen to, and why. Or how, at least. The setup takes up almost two thirds of the movie, and the script (by Don Carlos Dunaway and Barbara Turner) takes special care in showing how all the pieces are set so that they'll fall just so.
 Cujo himself gets infected with rabies in the first scene, a bonkers sequence that follows a dog chasing a rabbit down a field into a very nice-looking burrow full of rabid bats; A whole complex, beautiful set built just for that. Lewis Teague, along with cinematographer Jan de Bont, go above and beyond in making a lot of scenes look incredible and very distinct - even ones like this one, which arguably only fulfills a minor role in the story. It's a surprisingly great-looking film.

 Then there's the Trentons, of which the Mrs. (Dee Wallace) and the Jr. (Danny Pintauro) are scheduled to be terrorized by the giant rabid canine. They have their own issues; Donna's been having an affair with family friend Steve (Christopher Stone), and her husband Daniel (Daniel Hugh Kelly) is starting to suspect. Their marriage isn't in a great place, as you'd expect, but little Tad - about whom both are crazy - keeps them together.
 If it sounds a bit soap-opera-ish... well, it kid of is, but it's well-handled, taking a page from King's naturalistic dialog, and ably aided by some beautifully understated work from the actors (particularly Dee Wallace). Pintauro is also incredible, giving a ridiculously good and very realistic child performance.

 The important thing is that it all feeds into the story. The fight, along with a crisis at Daniel's advertising firm, conspires to keep them separated, and the particulars of their situation leave Donna driving a barely functioning Ford Pinto up to a mechanic just outside town. The mechanic (Ed Lauter) and his family situation is yet another story thread that the film duly picks up on - an important one, because said family own one soon-to-be man-eating (times three) St. Bernard.

 There's a bleak inevitability to how things play out, along with some sharp gallows humour. In the book there's an inchoate evil spirit who's implied to be setting up the situation, but the movie ignores all that (though it left in Tad's night terrors and fear of monsters), and it's probably all the better for it.
 What the film does lose is the characters' inner dialogue, especially for Cujo, whose point-of-view chapters were heartbreaking in the book. The movie does an admirable job conveying some of it, but it's not the same. It's also a bit jarring to cut away from Donna and Tad's struggle for survival to drop in on Daniel eating lobster with a colleague. It all ties into the story, and generates some suspense, , but it still feels a little too drawn out for its own good.
 I'm also not a fan of Charles Bernstein's score. Reeds make me drowsy.

 Lewis Teague had directed one of the best 80's creature features in Alligator, so it's no surprise that he excels at the actual monster/dog attacks. There are a couple shots were Cujo is a little unconvincing (including one instance of it wagging its tail as it prepares to rip someone's throat out), but on the main it's fine, and where it counts - where the dog is mauling people or trying to dismantle the car to get at poor Donna and Tad - it's all very effective.

 All the more effective because of all the groundwork the film painstakingly laid out in the previous hour. They're fleshed out, flawed, likeable characters stuck in a horrible but also fully fleshed out situation.
 This Stephen King guy might be on to something.