I thought I’d get a little festive.
This came from one of my Mill Creek collections (Drive In Movie Classics) and is presented in glorious VHS-redubbed quality. There will be spoilers in this review, so if you want to keep this magnificent film’s artistic integrity intact, you might want to come back another day.
Let’s start from the beginning: creepy mouth-breather sneaking up on a couple making out in a car. The male of the pair has just gotten off his job as a back-alley Santa, which seems to be the schtick in this movie. I’ve never been to England, but here in Canada our Santas sit in malls instead of roasting chestnuts in dank cobbled laneways.
Anyway, our mouth-breathing friend goes all stabby, then suddenly we’re at a costume party (?) where the next Santa gets shanked with what amounts to a homemade javelin.
The news reports on the trend of Santa-murder, but that doesn’t stop anyone from wearing the exact same bad Santa costume and parading through circuses and weird sex dungeons. Yep, you read that right.
There follow a series of murders, and mandatory female nudity, including one woman who goes outside wearing nothing but a Santa cape. Our villain finds her, but upon discovering she’s female, leaves her.
I mean, he has standards.
Our Santas run around being drunk and getting up to debauchery.
This one’s at a peepshow: “I’d like to have you sitting on my knee.”
Then one stumbles into a music video? I don’t even know.
Meanwhile, our heroine (whose name I don’t recall, because I was simultaneously reading Memebase so enthralled with the plot) is trying to get over the murder of her father. She accomplishes this by busking in the street with her asshole boyfriend, who seems remarkably unphased by the murders. Ooooh, is he the killer? Wait for what feels like ten more years to find out!
Blah blah more murders, more nudity, then BAM! Knife in a shoe!
Crafty.
Yet men still keep dressing up in the same horrible Santa costume, and keep getting picked off.
It’s exactly what you think it is.
Our psycho goes slinking around acting generally sketchy.
He looks perfectly sane. Really.
Pretty well everyone dies, which is about right for a schlocky horror. But what, might you ask, made our psycho hate Christmas so much? Could it have been, say, a traumatic childhood incident?
Oh.
The dialogue is alright, it’s the plot and the wooden acting that make it awful.
I haven’t determined a ratings-system for these yet, because frankly I’m hoping all the movies I review will be terrifically cheesy. However:
Watch for: the surprisingly clever killer-killer
Cringe at: the awful soundtrack that plays over every. single. scene.
Guess: what’s in the box. Dun-dun-dunnn…
sniderwriter 