Awful Advent #12: Krampus (2015)

Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas

For this year’s penultimate entry, a boy’s waning belief in the spirit of Christmas summons not Santa, but his dark counterpart, Krampus!

Max gets into a fight during the nativity play with a boy who tells the first graders Santa doesn’t exist, Max's family is stressed out at the thought of their in-laws coming for the holidays, and those in-laws are aggressively mean to him. In a fit of pique, Max tears up the letter he’d written to Santa and throws it out the window only to see the pieces float away into the sky. The next day, a blizzard descends upon his neighborhood, the power cuts out, and strange snowmen appear in the front lawn, harbingers of the monsters yet to come.

Krampus is an odd duck. It’s a big-budget holiday horror film, which is rare enough, and it draws upon the ironic, hipster-ish Christmas icon, Krampus. Of course there’s a real Krampus tradition and folklore, but that’s not the role it has in English-speaking holiday celebrations. It’s moreso the icon of the anti-Christmas brigade: those exhausted by the holiday’s insistence upon itself and who fail to identify with the Grinch or Scrooge since they both succumb to that all-consuming spirit. So me and similar jackasses who look for movies where Santa is as likely to be the purveyor of presents as a purveyor of fear.

Krampus approaches Christmas with the right attitude: the holiday sucks and it’s a burden we all endure for inexplicable reasons. We open with a slowed sequence of people being awful in a store. This sequence is what Black Friday needed, but never had: customers are yelling at each other, abusing staff, and getting tased. The sequence, and credits, end with Max, our hero, in the midst of a fight during the nativity play. At home, he’s chastised by his parents for getting into a fight and we learn that the mother’s sister and her family are coming for the holidays—something no one is happy about.

And here’s where the movie starts to fall apart. I mentioned in regards to Dead End that we need to start from a place of joy, or at least be able to see what that joy could be, to have hope in a horror movie. To put it another way, the bad thing needs to be the monster, not the life we’re looking to return to.

Krampus, however, starts with Christmas being miserable, Max’s family being indifferent—when not irritable—to each other, and then the extended family arrives—loud, boorish, and engaged in general assholery. It feels like the movie is trying to do a upper-middle-class liberal vs working-class conservative family thing—the visiting family arrives in a Hummer loaded with ammunition while Max’s family lives in a house that “looks like Martha Stewart threw up”—but to no real purpose. All it gives us is people being shitty to each other in unentertaining ways (except for Aunt Dorothy played by Conchata Ferrell whose every line is a delight).

The characters have some moments of redemption, but they come at the wrong time or don’t pay off. For example, Max writes a letter to Santa Claus. He’s too old to believe in Santa, but it’s something done as a ritual. Like getting eggnog or watching Miracle on 34th Street, this is what Max does to center himself and focus on what’s important in the holiday season. He asks Santa to, basically, make things like they were: let him be friends with his sister again, let his parents fall in love again, make things less desperate for his aunt and uncle. In these stories, the revelation of the letter’s contents is supposed to come somewhere in the late second/early third act as it inspires the characters to become their better selves. Here, it gets stolen and read out loud during the first dinner after the aunt and uncle have arrived so it doesn’t inspire anything. Instead, it’s the letter that Max rips up which then travels to Krampus. Sure, him destroying the letter represents his abandonment of those hopes and is the inciting incident, but I just don’t feel it.

Another issue is that Max is supposed to be the main character, but we generally leave him alone after he tears up the letter. His dad and uncle really take center stage and they’re the ones who have to face down the monsters that serve Krampus.

The monsters, by the way, are fantastic. The design, not just of them, but of everything is really well done. I remember seeing this in theaters and being struck by the sound design. Granted, you’re not supposed to notice the sound design. Like editing, when it’s done right, you don’t notice it at all. However, I was aware at how much I felt immersed in this wintry nightmare the first time I saw it. I felt literally cold.

I just wish it didn’t leave me feeling metaphorically cold.

The easy comparison is to Gremlins: it’s a Christmas movie with small cute monsters murdering people. So it’s disappointing that we get, comparatively, so little of the monsters and so few setpieces as notable as the ones in Gremlins. Instead there’s a lot of mood—dread, darkness, and waiting—without payoff. Something burrows through the snow and tries to drag the uncle away until dad shoots it. They have to keep the fire hot to prevent anything from coming down the chimney. Writing that makes this sound like a Christmas twist on Tremors (which is now all I want for Christmas).

So much of the movie is about the downtime. As these characters interact, and you’d expect them to resolve their differences and grow as people, which they do. A little. We get to see mom and dad have a nice, albeit brief, conversation that suggests things are getting better between them, and the dad and uncle come to have a kind of grudging respect for each other, but I never buy into it and neither does the movie. That’s not what the movie’s interested in. It’s interested in Krampus and his cadre of monsters, but never gives us enough time with them.

It’s so strange to discuss the movie this way because it’s never bad, on any level, but it never quite hits the mark either. It’s worth watching as part of a holiday horror marathon or just on its own, but it also feels like a one-and-done. I don’t think I’ll be returning to this in the future.

3/5 chimney-dangling kinder-snatching Krampus chains

Krampus is available for purchase or rental from various online services.

Awful Advent #11: Elves (1989)

Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas

For this year’s eleventh entry, Grizzly Adams faces off against incestuous Nazi science to prevent the apocalypse in Elves!

A trio of young women dubbing themselves the “sisters of anti-Christmas” try to hold an ad hoc ritual in the forest, but one of them accidentally cuts herself. Her blood awakens a long-slumbering elf that proceeds to seek her out to enact a decades-old Nazi plot. The only person who can protect her is a recovering alcoholic ex-detective working as a department store Santa.

No holiday horror marathon is complete without some Santa sleaze, and that’s the best word to describe this movie. For example, the main character catches her brother peeping on her while she’s changing. He, an actual child, says, “You got fucking big tits and I’m going to tell everyone I saw.”

At another point, this young woman is sitting on Santa’s lap where he leans in and whispers, “Santa said ‘oral’” while rubbing her leg. Shortly thereafter, the weird Nazi elf stabs him to death. In the dick.

Obviously, there’s a lot to recommend this movie just on the level of batshittery. It’s not good by any standard. Dan Haggerty half whispers, half mumbles all his lines, we never get the kind of gore you’d really expect from a movie like this, and the whole thing feels silly. In fact, it feels like it’s walking the edge of being safe-for-television until the mom strips down and takes a bath. Plus, you have a lot of f-bombs and just general weirdness.

I mentioned in the Joe Bob Ruins Christmas review that he’s good at giving both the context and production details of a movie and I’d really like his take on this one. The movie leaves you gobsmacked and just asking, “how?” at each and every moment. How did any of this seem like a good idea?

The movie is profoundly stupid, nigh unwatchable, and then it throws you an incest curveball, but it’s also a movie I’d recommend for those very reasons. It has a terrible puppet, campy professors, and Dan Haggerty staggering in from nowhere to start beating a man. It’s 100% the kind of dumb Christmas horror you want to watch with friends while drinking beer and eating pizza or to have playing in the background of a holiday party. It is, of course, not something to watch in and of itself or on its own merits. It has no merits. It is, however, a treasure. Or maybe a turd. Either way, I’ll gladly leave it buried for someone else to find.

2/5 salacious Santas stabbed in the jingle sack

Elves is currently unavailable through any official platform

Awful Advent #9: To All a Goodnight (1980)

Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas

For this year’s ninth entry, a killer dressed as Santa stalks the youths staying at a girls’ finishing school over winter break in To All a Goodnight!

That one line intro is the summary of the entire movie. That’s it. That’s all there is. It’s a slasher movie where the slasher is dressed as Santa Claus.

The movie opens with a girl being chased through the school by a gaggle of other girls. She runs out onto a balcony where someone pushes her and she magically turns into a life-sized stuffed doll that lands, Michael-Myers-style, on the ground below. Cut to two years later and all the girls at the school are heading home for winter break. A few are staying behind with the housemother, the creepy religious groundskeeper, and a plot to sneak in some boys who are literally flying over in a private plane.

There’s no real mystery over who the killer is or why they’re doing it (although if you don’t already know, the thumbnail on Shudder shows the killer). Shades of Friday the 13th with the killer seeking revenge against anyone in the same demographic as the people they feel are responsible for their daughter’s death, all with a Silent Night, Deadly Night gloss. To call the film “derivative” would be both unfair and inaccurate. It came out 4 months before Friday and 4 years before Silent Night. However, “generic” would be a fair description.

The movie does have its moments of flair, but mostly rolls off the brain. Characters start dying before you have any sense of who they are and then the movie pauses so its second act can do the work of establishing the surviving characters. The characters’ actions fall on both sides of the reasonable/happening-because-we-need-a-movie divide and they’re not interesting characters, but the movie is efficient at making it clear who will live and who will die.

Also, the movie’s budgetary constraints are generally handled well. It doesn’t look as cheap as it surely must be, except in the day-for-night shots. “Day-for-night” means filming during the day and trying to make it look like night, usually by putting a blue filter over the lens. You do it because you can’t afford the light kits you’d need to properly shoot at night. It’s one of the things we accept in filmmaking because you do what you gotta do. It doesn’t look 100% real, but it’s usually not so glaringly obvious as to kick you out of the movie.

To All a Goodnight has day-for-night shots without the blue filter. So they’re just day shots. The characters are just walking around during the day. Even though it’s supposed to be night. We know it’s night because they’re carrying flashlights and mentioning how dark it is. As they squint at the sun.

Those shots were a real high point for me: it’s rare you get to see something done badly in a new way. Another thing I really enjoyed was the spate of elderly teens. This is a prep school for girls and no one is a teenager here. Which is good in practical terms because there is nudity and I don’t want to see naked kids, but also hilarious when you see people who clearly have mortgages pretend to be young.

What is there to say? It’s a cheaply but competently executed early-80s slasher. It’s neither excellent nor execrable. It’s fine. Add it to your library of Santa slashers or run it in the background of your holiday party. It has nice aesthetics, is a bit of a time-capsule, and doesn’t get on the nerves. It’s a bit of fun.

2.5/5 Santa-slashed sorority sisters

To All a Goodnight is currently available to stream on Shudder.

Awful Advent #3: 3615 Code Père Noël (1989)

Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas

For this year’s third entry, we have the movie that (maybe?) was the inspiration for Home Alone, the French thriller 3615 Code Père Noël, aka Deadly Games, Dial Code Santa Claus, Game Over, and Hide and Freak

A young boy must use improvised traps and weapons to protect himself, his grandfather, and their home from an invader dressed as Santa Claus.

The obvious parallel is to 1990’s Home Alone where a young boy has to keep two thieves from robbing his home while his family is away for Christmas. However, where that movie is very cartoony, this is almost immediately more grim. When the false Santa first arrives at the house—via chimney no less—he’s attacked by the family dog and stabs it to death while the child watches from under a table.

And here’s the crazy thing: despite that, this doesn’t feel much less like a child’s fantasy than Home Alone.

One element contributing to that feeling is the semi-dreamlike nature of a lot of the movie. You remember how movies used to indicate a kid was rich by showing his racecar bed? This movie introduces our hero, Thomas, waking up in his fighter jet bed that hangs from the ceiling. The house itself is a castle which Thomas—a child prodigy, of course—has wired up with video cameras, remote-operated security shutters, and booby traps. Within the house is a secret passage that only he knows about that leads to a cavernous room that holds all his toys, all his father’s toys, and all his father’s father’s toys.

In other words, we start with the house an 8-year-old would make for themselves if they could make their dream house a reality.

His mother and grandfather give him full reign, allowing him run of the house and denying him nothing. He wakes up by dressing himself in Rambo cosplay and then has a guerrilla-style chase with his dog including piping the sound of gunfire through the house speaker system.

Reality is creeping in, though. His mother gets a ride to work (at the Printemps department store downtown that she owns) from her colleague and lover that Thomas clearly doesn’t approve of. Also, Thomas’ friend has told him that there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.

In the hopes of keeping his fantasy alive, mom decides, on Christmas Eve, to throw a massive Christmas party at the store requiring the hiring of all sorts of performers. Why start planning this on Christmas Eve and not a month ago? “A month ago, children still believed in Santa Claus,” she says.

As an aside, I know this is supposed to be charming, to demonstrate the mother’s affection for Thomas, and to ramp up the fantasy aspect of the story (my mom can make anything happen!), but it does flip all my switches about living under capitalism. The rotten boss’ dirty shit boy son doesn’t believe in Santa so all the plebes have to work a surprise double shift on Christmas Eve. And if those costumes aren’t perfect, heads are going to roll! To top it all off, Thomas never goes to the store so there's no reason within the world of the story for any of this to happen. However, for the purposes of the plot, the Christmas party is to get the home invader hired as a last-minute Santa, get fired, and then seek out the boss’ son for his own reasons.

Those reasons stem from the titular 3615 Code Père Noël. The movie opens with children having a snowball fight in front of a billboard advertising a BBS where you can chat to Santa via your computer. The home invader sees the kids having the snowball fight and tries to join in only to have them all run away. The next time we see him, he’s using a public computer terminal to chat on the BBS as Santa. He’s talking to Thomas who wants proof that Santa exists and mentions that his mom is the manager of the local Printemps.

So through a series of narrative contrivances he ends up at the house and is stalking the kid and his grandfather. Things go as you’d expect, but we never really know why he’s there or what he wants. It’d be better, honestly, if it were a little more like Home Alone and he was just a robber. Instead he seems to be mentally impaired somehow, not fully aware of what’s going on, which makes some of the things that happen later unexpectedly tragic. However, when we see him working as Santa, it’s his seeming creeping on a little girl that gets him fired. And he kills the dog. So how much sympathy are we supposed to have?

The movie is pretty good overall. It has a nice subtle arc throughout of moving from being a kids’ fantasy to being a serious thriller: Thomas’ desire to talk to Santa Claus and being obsessed with toys evolving into him dropping his pretenses at fantasy and focusing on things like keeping safe and getting his grandfather insulin. The conclusion features Thomas repeating various things said throughout the movie that culminate in him being clearly traumatized by the situation which speaks to the movie being really well composed and thought through.

This was a movie I’d heard about a lot but only recently had access to, and, sadly, it didn’t live up to the image I had of it being a truly bonkers ultra-violent version of Home Alone, which is an unfair standard to hold it to. However, it does feel like a demented Miracle on 34th Street in that it’s about someone trying to convince a child that Santa is real. Only it’s done through the lens of Silent Night, Deadly Night, and that’s still pretty wild. It’s a pretty good, albeit dated, flick and definitely worth a watch. I don’t’ know that I’ll return to it again on my own, but if I’m ever programing another holiday marathon/party, it’s 100% on the list.

3.5/5 secret stalker Santas

3615 Code Père Noël is currently available to stream on Shudder