Christmas Bloody Christmas

Ho Ho Horror

Christmas
Bloody Christmas
Directed by Joe Begos
2022 Shudder

Wow, wow, wow!

Regular readers may remember that I discovered a couple of movies by a low budget horror director earlier this year and was pretty much blown away by them (with reservations... always with reservations)... the pretty great ‘Scanners sequel that isn’t a Scanners sequel’ movie The Mind’s Eye (reviewed by me here) and also, the incredibly cool vampire movie Bliss (reviewed by me here). And now this director, Joe Begos (who I should maybe start referring to as The Mighty Begos), has made a Christmas horror movie... well... yeah, it is just about technically a horror movie in the weird science mode, I think... Christmas Bloody Christmas and, wow again, it’s a dandy.

Incidentally, Dandy is also the name of the incredible lead actress of the piece, one Riley Dandy, who plays lead female protagonist Tori Tooms. Joining her as the lead male protagonist is the equally cool Sam Deitch as Robbie Reynolds. These two are absolutely perfect as Begos knocks it out the park again with an ear for good dialogue in his script, enabling the two lead actors (and others, naturally, including a small role for Dora Madison, the incredible star of Bliss) to give a truly enthusiastic and natural performance. It’s Christmas Eve and Tori, who runs a small town record shop and has a very good working relationship with her employee Robbie, is about to shut up shop for the holidays. And the dialogue between these two is just electric, totally selling the relationship of two people just about ready to fall into bed with each other. The two performers have this amazing chemistry that ensures you absolutely are sucked into their fast paced world and totally care about them. That’s good because, in the infinite wisdom of a faceless corporation, some military defence technology has been used to create a new range of realistic looking and acting Santa Claus robots, which they have deployed into shops and malls to entertain the kiddies. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, something has gone wrong because a random news item in the background of a scene says that they are being recalled by the manufacturer. This doesn’t stop the one in the local toy shop from reverting to its military training, grabbing a handy axe and chopping up all and sundry (including, refreshingly, a little kiddie even). And because Tori was a direct witness to one of the murders on its killing spree... it’s coming for her next!

So, yeah, terminator Santa Claus goes bad and goes on a slaughter rampage. It’s a nicely cheesy set up that could go a number of ways but... Joe Begos, remember! This is a director I’ve learned to trust and he just nails the humour and the ramped up violence perfectly. He introduces the concept of the ex-military, mechanised Santa as the last of a series of adverts (which kind of places the time setting in a satirical, alternate version of our present, more or less) in a way which reminded me of those adverts used for similar purposes in the original Robocop (I think writers like Frank Miller were doing this kind of thing first in American comic books... and, even before him in some of the wonderful British comics like 2000AD in the 1970s). And from there it becomes a very character driven story as we cross cut between Tori and Robbie’s drunken, sex fuelled Christmas Eve to the Robo Santa turning bad and getting into some serious axe wielding with Dora Madison’s character, who is having sex in her toy store with her husband after hours.

And, it looks amazing. If you think of the kind of bright, saturated lighting styles of Mario Bava and certain Dario Argento movies and then multiply it up several notches so it looks like everyone is kinda neon lit, you’ll get some idea. Also, well done to the director for having some serious falling snow in this movie. Usually you get wisps of it flying around in the movies but it really is coming down heavy in some of the earlier sequences in this one and I really appreciated that.

So, yeah, it’s filled with genre clichés for sure... such as snow covering the visibility on the windscreen of Robbie’s ‘not quick to start’ vehicle, in order to obscure vision and tease the audience etc and there’s even an example of that zoom in while pulling back (or vice versa) shot that Hitchcock used in Vertigo, purloined most famously by Steven Spielberg in Jaws. But, again, The Mighty Begos (it’s rare I get to trust a director this quickly and totally) plays the clichés and makes them all fun once more. Some of the practical gore effects... which included head stomps. head splits, eye gouging and more... maybe don’t always seem 100% realistic but it’s a heck of a lot better than using CGI and I really appreciated the look of this one in regards to the technical effects. Also, it’s a horror movie (kinda) so nobody, not even the leads, are safe from the possibility of some kind of harm or even death. You really won’t know until the last few shots if there are going to be any survivors on this one... it could go either way.

Now, there are a couple of little nitpicky things I have to mention... because I almost always do find something not to my taste in a movie, right? Number one, if you’re going to have the lead protagonists indulging in some fairly hot cunnilingus... well it’s usually customary for people to be naked in such situations? Secondly... how many people are living in this town? I mean, if you are going to be continually blowing stuff up and leaving a trail of impressively maimed corpses behind you... then someone’s going to stray out of their house in order to see what all the fuss is about, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t have a record shop and a toy store that could stay ‘in the red’ in town. So, yeah, a complete lack of interest by the town’s inhabitants to the screams and the vehicles/buildings blowing up amongst them would be my number one problem with the movie, for sure.

But, you know what? I don’t care. It’s just a fantastically fun movie and I wish this one had gotten a cinema release because that’s where I would have liked to have seen it. I was somewhat surprised, however, that there was a little, derogatory dig at Blumhouse in the movie... I don’t know how they got away with that. I hope it’s in the spirit of friendly rivalry between Shudder and Blumhouse and not something more malevolent going on, for sure. That aside, though, if you want a seriously cool and engrossing, switch your brain off and gawk at the pretty, fast moving, fluid camera movement with protagonists and antagonist bashing the hell out of each other... tinged with a big slice of Christmas cheer... then Christmas Bloody Christmas is pretty much the new go to movie for the season. It’s an instant classic and I can only hope that we can get a Blu Ray release of the film in time for next Christmas and, also, a nice CD release of Steve Moore’s wonderful electronica score would also be very welcome in this household. Definitely check this one out if you like exceptionally well crafted, Christmas blood and gore. Outstanding.