Christmas Bloody Christmas, 2022.
Directed by Joe Begos.
Starring Riley Dandy, Sam Delich and Abraham Benrubi.
SYNOPSIS:
A robotic shopping mall Santa Claus comes to life and promptly embarks upon a Christmas Eve killing spree.
Christmas and horror are excellent bedfellows, with the forced smiles of the festive season easily twisted into vile grimaces. If a time of year declares itself to be the “most wonderful”, then someone will want to take it down a few pegs. The latest entry into the canon of gore-soaked festive movies is the new Shudder original Christmas Bloody Christmas, which certainly wins points for having an admirably straightforward title. It promises Christmas and blood – two things the movie delivers in abundance.
Like many seasonal slashers, the film doesn’t spend a great deal of time building its characters. Our protagonist is the snarky, Christmas-sceptic record store owner Tori (Riley Dandy), who decides to blow off a Christmas Eve Tinder date to spend the night hanging out and getting smashed in a bar with her employee Robbie (Sam Delich). He clearly fancies her and, with the magic of Christmas in the air, she seems willing to entertain his flirtations – for this evening at least. Their festivities are shattered pretty quickly when they are targeted by a malfunctioning robot Santa Claus – Jolly Old Saint Nick meets Michael Myers meets The Terminator.
There aren’t many original ideas at play in Christmas Bloody Christmas, but director Joe Begos – who recently made VFW and the celebrated Bliss – certainly knows his way around a gory set piece. The effects work is consistently strong and is given a crunchy punch by the decision to use mostly practical means to achieve the splatters, splinters and axe wounds. Even the marauding robot himself eschews the easy CGI option. There’s added visual panache in the fact that many of the most grotesque sequences are lit with the garish, evocative neon glow of fairy lights, rather than via more conventional means.
For all of its technical flair, there’s a slapdash feel to the plotting. Begos’s script keeps things simple to an absurd degree and barely even spends a minute or two introducing the supposedly important characters who almost immediately turn out to be cannon fodder for robo-Santa’s swinging blade. There is, however, an admirable chemistry between Dandy and Delich, with the former especially having all of the tools to be an A-grade horror lead in future. Their amiable bickering is almost enough to keep the film on track, even if their pop culture banter is a bit of a sub-Tarantino festival of try-hard.
But ultimately, there’s nothing here that anyone familiar with Christmas-themed horror won’t have seen many times before. Begos’s innovative visual trickery and Dandy’s spirited central performance are bright spots, but it takes more than a few stellar kills to hold together a film like this. It works as a 90-minute festive diversion for gorehounds but, in a crowded field of bloodthirsty Christmas treats past and present, it barely registers as a distant tinkle of sleigh bells.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist and wrestling fan. Follow him on Twitter via @TomJBeasley for movie opinions, wrestling stuff and puns.
