Violent Night may be the killer Santa Claus movie that’s grabbing the headlines, but Tommy Wirkola‘s merrily messy home invasion genre feast feels as cosy and benign as Miracle on 34th Street next to Joe Begos’ grindhouse slasher Christmas Bloody Christmas, perhaps the most twisted and mean-spirited seasonal shocker since Bob Clark’s holiday horror urtext Black Christmas. Begos is a devotee of the art of low-budget thrills, but a relentless final hour jars with a lengthy, dialogue driven first act. Both are enjoyable on their own terms, but the odd pacing leaves this particular killer Claus something of a tinselled Frankenstein’s monster.
Tori (Riley Dandy) is closing up her achingly cool, grungy record store on Christmas Eve, and just wants to get drunk and have a party. She flirts and slugs whisky with her employee Robbie (Sam Delich, two meters of mullet, moustache, and machismo), and the pair stop off on their way to a bar to chat to some friends who work in a toy store. Unbeknown to them, that store’s animatronic Santa Claus – apparently repurposed military tech with a trillion dollar budget – is about to come to life and begin a murderous rampage through the town.
Apart from the irresistible concept Santa going all T-800, much of the appeal of Christmas Bloody Christmas lies with the easy and incredibly profane banter between Tori and Robbie. There is a naturalistic, improvised feel to their musings on life, love, sex, movies and heavy metal that falls somewhere between the aimless, hanging-out atmosphere of early Richard Linklater, the fixation on pop cultural ephemera of Clerks, and the will-they-won’t-they mumblecore chemistry of Ti West‘s The Innkeepers. While not exactly the most likeable people, the pair are rounded out as plausible and eventually sympathetic characters through their dialogue; their vocal opinions on all things trivial riddled with escalating volleys of expletives increasing with their alcohol intake.
So it’s real change of pace when Robo-Santa goes feral and sharp dialogue is replaced with a sharper axe and scene after scene of pleasingly squishy practical effects. As in his previous film, the ‘bar-invasion’ splatterfest VFW, Begos demonstrates a real skill with energetic and memorably nasty set pieces shot with a fetishist’s gimlet eye for ’80s-style lo-fi slaughter. Josh Russell‘s effects hit the spot, especially the almost charming animatronic Santa itself (played when intact by Abraham Benrubi) with an exoskeleton cobbled together from bits and pieces like one of Sid’s creations in Toy Story. It knowingly mocks the claim of the highest-end military hardware, looking every inch a few nano-percent of the trillion dollars the story claims.
Christmas Bloody Christmas is undeniably a wild ride, and the impressive Dandy easily switches from formidably cocksure hedonist to desperate scream queen at the swish of an axe. The super-16mm cinematography also gives the blood-on-snow brutality a permanent, bewitching backdrop of shimmering neon and Christmas lights. It’s a fine-looking film in its particular grimy way. Yet there’s slightly too much of a gulf between the patient setup and the frenzied execution, and a little more backstory on the malfunction behind the Santa wouldn’t have gone amiss. Begos is more than adept at this kind of stripped-back action, but his ambitiously freaky and distinctive spin on the vampire genre Bliss remains his best feature. Still, one can easily see Christmas Bloody Christmas whipping up a loyal seasonal following.
Screening on Shudder from Fri 9 Dec 2022