Demonic Christmas Tree

Blood N’ Pine

Demonic Christmas Tree
aka The Killing Tree
Directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield
UK 2022
Dark Abyss Productions

Warning: A treeful of spoilers.

Okay, wow. This is going to be a real short review and, for that I apologise but, it takes a lot of time and effort by all concerned to make a movie so... I don’t want to write too lengthy an article to tell you how terrible it is in various ways.

I watched Demonic Christmas Tree because it has an absolutely brilliant central concept. The wife of a Christmas themed serial killer uses her executed husband’s ashes in a black magic ritual to revive him so he can get revenge on the ‘final girl’ of his initial killing spree and carry on doing more killing... in the name of people who think it’s all about gifts and not knowing the true meaning of Christmas. So kill them all is the mindset. But the ritual goes wrong and, instead, her husband is brought back to life as a homicidal Christmas tree... a living Christmas tree with coloured lights, the killers voice, badly CGI’d twig appendages and, of course, it’s completely mobile and is even seen driving a car at one point.

Now, yeah, you’d think with an amazing, high level concept like that, there’s no way anybody could screw it up. You’d be wrong. The film is actually quite bad and, somehow, dull... considering it has a lot of good things going for it, which you would think would stop that from happening. The cinematography is absolutely fine and the various actors are also... well yeah, okay, nobody here is going to be winning any academy awards but it’s not that kind of movie and they’re basically all just fine too. So what’s wrong with this?

Well, the CGi is not great but, if you’ve ever let badly executed special effects stop you from enjoying a cracking movie then you probably shouldn’t bother watching stuff anyway. I think the trouble here... and I might be wrong as this is only a guess... is that the cast and crew here were maybe, deliberately trying to make a bad movie and, that’s a very fine line to walk. I’ve seen this kinda thing done well in the past, such as in movies like Santa Jaws (reviewed here) but even with a healthy dose of self awareness manifested on screen, as this one kinda has (I hope that’s what it was going for, or this movie is even worse than I thought), this can backfire quite badly if the film is just uninteresting which, I’m sad to say, is the case here. I think the real problem here is the script and dialogue, to be honest. It’s really dire and I could see how some of the actors and the lead actresses here might be singled out by audiences as somehow being bad at their job but, honestly, with dialogue this bad then the best acting in the world is not necessarily going to save it.

The cinematography is interesting because, as I said, it’s technically competent but it is all over the place. Once minute you’ll be following the camera through weird, moving or rotating dutch angles and the next you’ll be into intercut, static shots without any movement whatsoever. But the different styles of shooting various scenes doesn’t really jell very well, as it does on many other films. Here it just feels like different scenes have been shot by two or three different people, half the time. Which apparently is not the case. Also, there are a fair few moments in the movie where there are repeat lines of dialogue of the same thing shot from different angles which makes it feel like the producer was just trying to pad the film out. And it’s these scenes that lead me to believe that this film is deliberately trying to capture the ‘so bad it’s good’ vibe which has been successful for a fair few directors... except in this case it’s ‘so bad, it’s bad’. Because why else would you leave alternative versions of a scene in the picture?


Also, the kills in this are terrible. A lot of them are taking place either in long shot or even just out of the camera view and, instead, we see a lot of that awful looking ersatz CGI blood and, yeah, it certainly looks fake too. And, because it looks so artificial, like some modern, big budget Hollywood movies (to be fair), then it doesn’t have any kind of weight to it when somebody gets killed either.

And that’s me finished with Demonic Christmas Tree. Great concept but terrible execution, it has to be said. I certainly won’t be recommending this one to anybody I know and I certainly never want to revisit this one in future. Steer well clear of this one, would be my best advice.