An interwoven series of stories taking place on Christmas Eve, a group of high school students Molly, Ben, and Dylan (Zoé De Grand Maison, Alex Ozerov, and Shannon Kook) investigate a mysterious homicide that occurred the prior holiday season, a couple Scott and Kim (Adrian Holmes and Oluniké Adeliyi) notices their young son Will (Orion John) is acting strangely after a snowy forest trip to cut down a traditional tree, and one family Taylor, Diane, Caprice, and Duncan (Jeff Clarke, Michelle Nolden, Amy Forsyth, and Percy Hynes White) are stalked through a winter wonderland by Krampus (Rob Archer), the Christmas demon. Meanwhile at the North Pole, Santa (George Buza) is fending off zombie elves.
This is a Christmas film but not quite an anti-Christmas film but rather takes what we already know and takes it in more of a horror direction. The plot of this film consists of a series of stories (mentioned above) happening simultaneously on Christmas Eve, loosely connected by a radio DJ who is over-enthusiastic about Christmas named Dangerous Dan (William Shatner).
As you can see, there’s a lot going on here. The film primarily jumps between each of the four stories while going to Shatner’s Dangerous Dan to break up the more serious material. As far as the film itself goes, it only goes as far as each of the stories go and unfortunately they’re not all great. Out of the four stories here , only two of them really stood out.
It doesn’t really take much selling when it comes to having Santa trying to fend off zombie elves and the family battling Krampus was semi-exciting (maybe more so after seeing Krampus). The film’s two other stories, the high-schoolers and the one about the couple, were quite boring. The story about the high-schoolers was a little hard to understand because it didn’t make much sense and didn’t seem to lead to anything.
The story about the couple was just very cliché and its twist was predictable. The thing about an anthology being done concurrently is that if it’s going to tell each story at the same time, then they all have to be good because once a good story gains momentum, we are forced to go to an inferior story which happened quite often here. Like most horror films, this wasn’t very scary with most of the film’s scares happening during the second half. The effects here show how low budget the film was but were mostly well done. There is decent amount of blood and gore and Krampus definitely looks better here than it did in Krampus. The acting here was surprisingly decent with that in the couple’s story being the only exception.
Overall, this film is just a bunch of mindless fun in which people who are sick of Christmas and just want something a little different and horror movie fans might enjoy.
Score: 7/10
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.
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