Directed By Joe Begos

Starring – Riley Dandy, Sam Delich, Jonah Ray

The Plot – It’s Christmas Eve and Tori (Dandy) just wants to get drunk and party, but when a robotic Santa Clause at a nearby toy store goes haywire and begins a rampant killing spree through her small town, she’s forced into a battle for survival.

This film is rated R for scenes of gore, brutality, adult language, and drug use

Christmas Bloody Christmas Exclusive Trailer (2022) Riley Dandy, Abraham Benrubi – YouTube

POSITIVES

At this point, Joe Begos is like if Rob Zombie were a successful filmmaker. I make this audacious assessment because like Rob, Begos attempts to saddle these bigger than life characters with the atmospheric impulses of the films he grew up adoring, except in this instance and the much-respected “VFW”, Begos has already attained more of an effective consistency than his counterpart. For “Christmas Bloody Christmas”, those aforementioned characters are given an ample amount of time to flesh themselves, with the kind of dialogue paid to movie and music debates that feels ripe with authenticity from the kind of conversations that my friends and I constantly have. In addition to this, Begos breaks more than a few conventional rules of horror movie history, affording his film not only a beneficial unpredictability that maintains the urgency and vulnerability of the narrative and trivialized protagonist once the conflict materializes, but also helps in cementing the range of tonal evolution that takes shape once the fun in conversations are put to sleep in favor of a fight to the death. Begos creativity is also put to work, with a minimalist budget of scraps eliciting a gritty 16mm cinematography from first time Begos collaborator Brian Sowell, but also a scintillating synth-heavy score from trusted Begos composer Steve Moore. The former faithfully elicits the immersive essence of the Christmas season in its neon lighting aesthetics, truckloads of real snow made exclusively for the film, and the small-town setting of the townsfolk’s caustic wit of psychology for the season, while the latter ominously engages us with thick and unnerving compositions that work candidly within the confines of the scenes they depict, without downright overstepping their boundaries to the visuals. The performances are equally pivotal to the Grindhouse dynamic that Begos furnishes with delight, particularly from Riley Dandy, who supplants a leading lady turn that Linda Hamilton, Sigourney Weaver, and Jamie Lee Curtis would be proud of. Dandy’s wit and radiant personality are only secondary to the physicality she distributes during some gruesomely intense conflicts, leading to an evolving resiliency that effectively illustrates the toughness within her, but without sacrificing the trepidation of fear within her that helps maximize the magnitude of the adversity that persists like a yuletide Terminator. And what an adversity it is, blessing us with visceral packages of brutal violence to continuously unwrap, with some of the best practical effects work packaging the kind of stomach-churning gore that C.G simply can’t render.

NEGATIVES

While the film’s production values evolve throughout the decay and devastation devised to its anabolic antagonist, the initial suspension of disbelief is a bit more than I bargained for, leaving even a B-movie Grindhouse descendent feeling slightly unrealized in the designs of its ambitious concepts. For around the first half hour of the film, it’s a bit difficult to suppress the idea that we’re watching an actor inside of a Santa suit, especially since the sound design doesn’t feel as prominently influential as it does in later acts, and the movements of the actor in question are a bit too fluid to feel anything but human. In addition to this, I felt that some of the point-of-view vantage depictions of the robot Santa killing his prey made it difficult to visually detect just what is persisting in frame. This obviously isn’t the case with the entirety of them, as some of the kills during the second and third acts are ripe with the kind of carnage candy that will approvingly rot the teeth of its audience, but in particular those during the opening act fell more than a little too flat for my personal tastes, leaving the road to repulsive feeling a bit too sedated for too long. Finally, though the supporting ensemble aren’t meant to be as prominent as Dandy’s Tori, I felt the script over committed to a first act massacre that wiped with it the opportunity of their characters. Because the script spends so much time establishing them during the opening act, an aspect that I wholeheartedly appreciate as a fan of 80’s B-movie horror, it’s disappointing that in a majority of them it ultimately leads to nothing. This isn’t necessarily a problem if the rest of the script maintains the powerful circumstance of this 30 minutes in sequence, but unfortunately there are short-term pacing issues littered casually throughout a sparse 83-minute run time, leading to a bit too much redundancy in the formula that becomes evident halfway into the film.

OVERALL
“Christmas Bloody Christmas” is the second film in as many weeks to feature an ax-wielding Santa Claus, but this time with Joe Begos’ tip of the cap direction to 80’s B-movie Grindhouse features offering an inescapable ruthlessness and substantial style to get you in the Christmas spirit. Although the film does fall victim to the occasional slow spot of momentum or obstructed depiction to its carnage, the majority of the experience gifts us what is easily the best Christmas themed horror film of all time, with a star-making turn from Dandy being the log that ignites the fire inside of this snowy splatter fest.

My Grade: 7/10 or B