With five features across nine years, director Joe Begos has very clearly carved out a niche: grungy low-budget odes to ‘80s genre films – Xtro, Scanners, Assault on Precinct 13, etc. – drenched in neon and further drenched in practical gore. His last film, VFW, was a muscular embrace of action horror, and now Christmas Bloody Christmas takes a holiday-themed stab at a body-count adrenaline rush. Violent Night recently gave audiences the gift of badass Die Hard Sant Claus, and a week later Begos unleashes kill-crazy Termiantor Claus; ‘Tis the season for Santa murder-fests.
An opening flurry of fake commercials immediately teases the mayhem to come, hailing the arrival of a military-grade robotic replacement for mall Santas everywhere. Now, just wait a half hour to get back to that and enjoy the unrelenting punk-album meta-movie conversations between record store owner Tori (Riley Dandy) and her friend Robbie (Sam Delich) until the killing eventually starts. Begos’ films haven’t exactly been driven by characterization, but the reams of banter between his leads oscillates between naturalistic back-&-forth, in-the-know album discussions, and painfully forced season-themed debates (A Christmas Story and Black Christmas, both the original and Blumhouse’s remake, get name-dropped). Despite Dandy’s and Delich’s profanity-packed rapid-fire chemistry, what should be a time spent endearing feels like a director wheel-spinning a potentially great short premise to feature length. A handful of other characters…sorry slasher fodder such as the local sheriff and a neighboring kid doesn’t make the overlong build-up to mecha carnage any more enjoyable.
And unfortunately, neither does the robo-Santa massacre when Christmas Bloody Christmas finally unleashes its mechanical killer. It’s not as much a slasher as it is just relentless slaughter and pursuit for nearly a nonstop hour, by axe, by shotgun, by vehicles: Begos bathes scenes in enough red and green lights to make Argento proud as his not-so-jolly android leaves obliterated bodies in its wake. Purely in terms of momentum and splatter, it’s an entertaining feat that gleefully finds new ways to destroy heads, lop off limbs, and fully embrace the justified unstoppability of its slasher. (Child’s Play 2 is another name-dropped reference and Begos’ Santa sure gives Chucky a run for his money in being outrageously hard to kill, while also paying homage to that sequel’s classic toy factory finale).
Yet for all the over-the-top gore, Dandy’s committed physical performance, and Santa’s green-targeting-laser-eyed menace, Christmas Bloody Christmas fails to inject an ounce of suspense or thrill into its set-pieces. Each sequence devolves into repetitive awkwardly-framed chaotically-shot fleeing and bloodshed, with only the barest attention paid to geography or clarity or further characterization beyond the first act. Realizing that a film featuring a robotic Santa rampaging via shotgun and commandeered ambulance can be so monotonous during its mayhem is as frustrating as it is surprising. At the very least, Begos’ previous film had personality to latch on to, a sense of escalation and dramatic crescendo, while this is purely hollow spectacle. Even a suddenly promising cat-&-mouse finale – not before a fiery Terminator reference, though – can’t help but go on seemingly forever until the climactic Tori-vs-machine battle finally, arbitrarily ends.
“Robo-Santa slasher” should be a prime horror homerun of a premise, but all the buckets of splatter and miles of holiday neon can’t salvage Christmas Bloody Christmas from tedium.
Photo courtesy of Shudder / RLJE Films
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