Awful Advent #7: The Lodge (2020)

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

For this year’s seventh entry, a film that explores the true horror of the holidays—spending time with your religious family. It’s The Lodge!

A young woman is spending Christmas with her partner’s two children at their isolated winter lodge. After falling asleep watching movies together, they wake up to find the power out, the water off, and all their possessions—including food—missing from the house. She needs to solve the mystery of what is happening, but memories of her cult leader father start cropping up and it’s not clear that there is a rational explanation.

I’m going to be circumspect about this movie because I really liked it and I don’t want to spoil anything. I’ll admit to rolling my eyes here and there guessing at the inevitable twist ending, but then the movie would lean into those very explanations. Rather than make me exasperated that the movie was drawing out its inevitable reveal (as a forthcoming movie on this list did), it made me doubt my assumptions and get drawn back into the movie.

At the center of the film is Grace, a young woman who, as a child, was the lone survivor of a Christian cult that had been led by her father. The cult all committed suicide leaving Grace behind as the messenger. Now, years later, she’s had therapy and is on medication to keep her anxiety and hallucinations in check.

She’s fallen in love with Richard, a married man with two children. In fact, we start the film with the mother dropping the children off with Richard. Grace is only a shadow in the background or a figure walking away in various cutaways for a good portion of the first act.

Richard asks his wife to finalize their divorce because he wants to marry Grace. There follows a sudden and shocking act of violence that leaves the wife dead and then we’re at the mother’s funeral. The congregants release a lot of black balloons into the sky, but the daughter ties her balloon to a doll she has of her mother, preventing it from floating away. That night she’s inconsolable, telling her father, “You don’t understand! Now she’ll never go to heaven!”

Over Thanksgiving, Richard tells his children that he plans to marry Grace and they object because they blame her for their mother’s death. We cut to Christmas where Grace will be staying with the children at the family’s winter lodge while Richard goes back to town for a few days to take care of business. Grace is unnerved by the Christian iconography in the lodge and things are stressful with the kids, but it seems like progress is being made.

And then they wake up to find the house stripped bare, the power out, and their cell phones dead. Dad took the car and they’re trapped in the middle of a blizzard.

300 words ago I said I’d be “circumspect,” but all of this is setup. What follows is the story itself with the erupting tensions between Grace and the kids, her own trauma resulting from surviving her father’s cult, and the mystery of what has actually happened.

Something I found interesting that I don’t think the film intended was the portrayal of mainstream Christianity as just another cult. This is 100% a result of my having left the church almost 30 years ago and abandoned my faith almost 20 years ago, but any kind of religious practice just looks so strange to my eyes. After the mother’s funeral, all the congregants release black balloons into the sky, which is a practice I’d never seen before. And it’s all done in front of a giant cross (not unlike the one at the start of The Day of the Beast) which made it all more Expressionistic and odd. The daughter’s extreme reaction afterwards sounded like someone deeply indoctrinated into a cult insisting upon the cult’s interpretation of the world: these rules must be followed or she’ll be damned.

The film actively plays with the manipulations of faith as well. Grace (subtle name) is made uncomfortable by the religious iconography in the house because it reminds her of her cult upbringing and the daughter saying grace before dinner feels like an intentional act of violence against Grace. It’s not the daughter doing her routine pre-dinner action, it’s done because she knows how uncomfortable religion makes Grace.

Like I said, I think that’s me more than the movie. I saw similar threads in the conclusion to The Wicker Man where the sergeant is crying out to Jesus to save him while the islanders are raising their voices to their own god. They’re crying out to their god in hopes of having their wishes granted the same way he is, only his wish is to no longer be on fire. It’s not so much that one god triumphs over the other as physics persists regardless.

All of that aside, this is a really good movie. It’s creepy, it’s twisty, and it’s shocking when it needs to be—and it knows what to make shocking. I highly recommend it in general, but I don’t think it’s really a holiday horror movie. Even more than The Day of the Beast, the Christmas aspect of this movie is incidental. Instead, it’s a psychological horror film set at winter and maybe a bit too heavy for the purposes I tend to put holiday horror films to. This movie demands your attention so it’s not something you’d just have on casually and it’s not visually splashy (although it does look great) so it doesn’t work as background fodder for a holiday party.

So, while I recommend it, not for Christmas.

4/5 reverends raving about Revelations and resurrection

The Lodge is currently available to stream on Hulu

Awful Advent #6: Gremlins (1984)

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

For this year’s sixth entry, it’s the movie that popularized the urban legend of dad dressing as Santa Claus and breaking his neck coming down the chimney: Gremlins!

A boy receives a strange creature as a Christmas gift with 3 specific rules: don’t get it wet, don’t feed it after midnight, and don’t expose it to the sun. As the rules get broken, malevolent creatures start raining havoc upon a small town on Christmas Eve.

Do I need to say anything about this movie? It’s Gremlins! You know Gremlins! We all know Gremlins! Remember all the different gremlins? You’re thinking of Gremlins 2: The New Batch. This is the one with a gremlin exploding in the microwave.

Gremlins is a holiday staple for me and an interesting one in that I always forget and am surprised by the details. I forget that Billy’s dad is an inventor. I forget about the opening scene in Chinatown that feels… let’s say “dicey.” Even though I bought my copy specifically because it’s a Christmas movie, I even forget that it all happens on Christmas Eve.

However, the most surprising thing I forget is just how well constructed and executed the movie is. It almost never puts a foot wrong.

Now, because this is the Internet, I will proceed to note, and only note, all the times it puts a foot wrong.

Honestly, there are only two. The first is the Chinatown sequence where the dad is trying to sell the shopkeeper the Bathroom Buddy. On this rewatch, I was immediately cringing because the movie opens in Chinatown and was shot in 1984. It has to be bad, right?

And it’s not, (except for the gong sound when the dad says “dragon breath.” That’s an immediately and obvious, “no”). The kid who leads him to the shop doesn’t have some terrible accent and, while the store is stocked with a host of “Oriental” items, the movie doesn’t seem to be using any of them to make a joke. Instead, like the scene later in the movie when the dad calls from the inventors’ conference and the background is filled with references to classic sci-fi, the shop—and the shopkeeper—feel like homages to the aesthetics of the Chinatowns that only ever existed in Fu-Manchu and Charlie Chan films. Which is why I said it feels “dicey.” The movie is making references to an aesthetic that was being racist. It’s nostalgic for those images without considering their meaning. To put it another way, the filmmakers weren’t trying to say anything with that scene, but they wouldn’t think or want to do that scene today.

The other point where the movie puts a foot wrong is Billy taking the dog to the bank at the start of the movie. He ties the dog up under the counter, his Scrooge-surrogate neighbor comes in to threaten the dog, and it jumps out and attacks her.

Let’s start with the last point first: the dog attacks her. I’m a dog person. I prefer dogs to people. She’s clearly a monster by the way she threatens the dog. But it attacks her in a public place without provocation. When Santa does exactly what the villain of Miracle on 34th Street says he would do, it’s justified and the culmination of a serious of provocations. Here, the dog is proving the villain right. It is dangerous and Billy is not being a responsible dog owner.

Which leads to the first point: why did Billy bring the dog to work? It’s 1984. You don’t bring your pets to work. Plus it seems like his mom is at home all day so there isn’t even a concern about the dog being left alone.

Of course, it’s all there to move the plot along and the movie is done well enough that it took me 35 years to go, “Hey… waitaminute.” It’s part of Dante’s broader aesthetic of nodding to other movies. I said the villain was Scrooge-like since she controls the mortgages of much of the town and is unconcerned about a family’s financial difficulties around Christmas. She also directly invokes the Wicked Witch of the West when she says she’ll get his little dog, too. And there are hints of Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life in her controlling the finances of the town without any concern for the effects she might have on the community.

One element that stood out on this watch were the references to economic desperation. Dad’s inventions are never finding a buyer, the neighbor is unemployed and slipping into depression, the love interest moonlights as a waitress at the local bar for free because the owner can’t afford to hire someone, and there is a family asking both the villain and the bank manager to not evict them on Christmas. The only character that seems to be doing well is Judge Reinhold, the smarmy vice-president at the bank who fails to woo the love interest with his 1984 luxuries—cable TV. Curiously, he doesn’t get killed. You’d expect that since he makes such a strong impression with his first appearance as a smarmy scumbag that he’d have an on-screen death, but he doesn’t reappear in the movie after that.

I don’t know that the economics play any part in the story, but they do speak to the quality of the film and its attention to detail. The world is lived-in and the characters are facing struggles even before the supernatural challenge arises. It’s one of the reasons the movie is so satisfying to return to—it is, in fact, a place that you can return to.

5/5 Christmas lights that are secretly eyes oh no!

Gremlins is currently available to stream on HBOMax

Awful Advent #5: Anna and the Apocalypse (2017)

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

For this year’s fifth entry, we find teenagers’ ambitions to escape their small-town life upended by the arrival of a zombie plague. Survival means they’ll have to resort to… singing and dancing in Anna and the Apocalypse!

A pandemic is gradually spreading around the globe and turning people into zombies, but that’s only a rumor on the radio. Of more immediate concern are Anna’s hopes of taking a gap year in Australia after graduation. Her father doesn’t want her to, partly due to finances, partly due to the recent death of her mother. Her friends all have their own concerns—her best friend John is in love with her but too afraid to make a move, student reporter Steph is having her stories dropped from the paper and failing to connect with her fellow students, and Chris is going to fail his media production class if he can’t create a sample video that reveals the real him.

Obviously, all these concerns get tossed over, but never fully disappear, once the zombie apocalypse arrives on the night of the Christmas play. Anna and John wake up safe at their homes and Steph and Chris have taken shelter at the bowling alley. They realize all their friends and family are still at the school and have to make their way there to reunite with the people most important to them. Meanwhile, tensions at the school are rising between those who want to leave to find their missing loved ones and those who want to remain in authority at the school.

And it’s a musical. Because of course it is.

And it’s an absolute delight. I loved this movie, just loved every aspect of it. It’s scrappy, it’s clever, and it has surprisingly subtle character turns. Anna has a douchebag ex-boyfriend who feels, at every moment, like the worst kind of creep. However, he has one line that reveals what all his bravado and cockiness is trying to mask as well as the precise shape of his sense of compassion for her that caught me completely off-guard. In fact, the movie was consistently catching me off-guard even though, much like Shaun of the Dead, there’s a scene early on that more than foreshadows everything that’s going to come.

Which speaks to the two things the movie does very well: it’s precisely constructed and it’s compelling. Looking at it from the perspective of being a coming-of-age/high-school-musical film, there are certain genre conventions you’d expect. While those characters are here, they don’t fall into the expected roles and they each have a meaningful arc. To the other point, I liked all these characters, even the ones I didn’t. They all seemed real to me and their reactions to each other were well-drawn. I believed in their relationships even when they had moments I hadn’t seen in a movie before.

Since the movie is a zombie movie, it naturally isn’t about the zombies but rather about what people do to each other when the status quo is disrupted. Much like Night of the Living Dead, it’s not so much the zombies that are the threat as it is the survivors and the limits of their humanity. Here, that manifests in the role of Vice Principal Savage, a suitably self-righteous authoritarian who’s more than willing to watch everyone die if they don’t respect his leadership. His superciliousness is elevated to the level of sociopathy once the outbreak begins and, frankly, I could have used more of that. We have just brief moments of him belittling Anna because her father is the school janitor and exercising his authority over the students simply because he can, but when he’s revealed to be truly monstrous in the final act of the film, it feels a little rushed, like they needed someone to be the villainous human. There is a director’s cut where he has an additional song that was cut because it made him truly irredeemable, but I work in education. I know that man. He is irredeemable from the moment he gloats to Anna that he’s going to make her father scrub the toilets. Accept that he’s a monster.

As for the film as a musical, I’d say it succeeds on that level as well since I’ve been listening to the soundtrack on repeat since watching the film. The songs are catchy as hell and filled with small references to zombie movies. It’s all just so well done.

Of course, it hits a little differently due to the pandemic. The emotional core of the film is the need to reduce the distance between yourself and your family, to find a way to touch them again after being separated and isolated by this threat that seems to have come from nowhere. There’s even a song about being connected to our phones and screens, but through the lens of turning to these devices for human contact, not likes and clout. Because the movie gets its characters’ core emotions right, it resonates emotionally even though our context has changed.

This is a fun movie, one I loved and am 100% adding to my annual holiday watchlist along with Miracle on 34th Street, Scrooged, and What Would Jesus Buy? Also, unlike The Day of the Beast, the Christmas setting isn’t incidental: characters are gathered at the school due to the Christmas pageant, they have to make their way through a Christmas tree warehouse, and Anna uses a giant candy cane to beat various zombies to death. It leans into the Christmas stuff where The Day of the Beast felt like it was coincidental.

To make things even better, the movie is streaming through both Hoopla and Kanopy—services you may have free access to through your local library.

Libraries rock.

5/5 Scottish Santa-smashing sirens

Anna and the Apocalypse is currently available to stream on Kanopy and Hoopla.

Awful Advent #4: El Día de la Bestia (1995)

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

For this year’s fourth entry, we have a story about a child destined to be born on Christmas Eve, and the priest who sells his soul to Satan in hopes of killing it: El Día de la Bestia, aka The Day of the Beast.

A theologian has cracked the code of the book of Revelations and learned that it reveals the exact date the antichrist will be born: Christmas Eve! He has a very short time to commit as many sins as he can and sell his soul to the Devil in hopes of learning the location of the birth and preventing the forthcoming apocalypse. The only ones who can help him are a good-hearted Satanic metalhead and the sceptical host of an occult call-in show.

I first saw this movie back in 1999 thanks to the film programmers at the University of Iowa. They booked the most eclectic selection of films for the student theater and this one stood out. The following summer, when I was back home with my family, we rented it on VHS so I could share this dark delight with them, only I’d seen the subtitled version and the tape was the dubbed version.

Ladies, blokes, and non-binary folks, I am subs over dubs all day long, but the dubbed version of this adds a layer of comedy that I did not know the film could have and it is a tragedy that you cannot watch that version.

The theologian at the center of the film, Father Berriartúa, is a small, slightly nervous, unassuming man. Imagine Mr. Bean without the physical presence. Much of the humor of the film comes from this little guy doing all sorts of unexpected and inappropriate things: pushing a mime into a subway stairwell, trying to drag a woman larger than himself up the stairs, walking away with someone’s luggage while they hail a cab. The people in charge of the English translation decided that this small, nervous man should sound like a very angry Sylvester Stallone, and, oh my goodness, it adds a whole 'nother layer of camp to the experience.

And this flick is a dark, campy delight, with the emphasis on “dark.” In the first five minutes, Father Berriartúa reveals his plan to sin as much as he possibly can to one of his fellow priests. His colleague is shocked and Berriartúa whispers his reasons into his colleague’s ear—whispers for fear that the Devil might overhear and intervene. His colleague agrees to help, and, as they walk away from the altar, the massive, straight-out-of-German-Expressionism cross falls forward and crushes the colleague, obliterating him.

That tells you the nature of the humor. It’s very dry, very direct, and very heightened. Frankly, the whole thing is very silly but done with a serious, earnest tone which makes all of the humor land that much more surely.

The movie does have a layer of seriousness at its core. It’s been twenty-ish years since I’d seen it so I’d forgotten that there was a band of neo-Nazi yuppies wandering the city setting homeless people on fire or that references to them are peppered throughout the movie. If the movie has something to say, it’s about the banality of evil. Berriartúa is trying to hunt down the antichrist so that he may kill the child—his ambition is to murder the baby at the moment of its birth. Admittedly, it’s to prevent the arrival of true evil in the form of the Devil. In his search for the child, though, he hears about the neo-Nazis trying to “clean up Madrid,” about abandoned children, even witnesses the cops descend upon and start beating a group of people walking along the street. While Berriartúa uses these incidents as evidence for his belief that the Devil will choose Madrid, there’s also the suggestion that the evil is already here, already within us, and that his pursuit is misguided even on that level—he shouldn’t be seeking the literal Devil but confronting the cultural devil that abides such evils.

That ambivalence, that doubt in whether he’s actually helping or doing something good persists right through the end of the movie. I was confused by the conclusion the first two times I watched this, and I’ll try to talk around the ending so as to avoid spoilers. In those early viewings, it wasn’t clear to me that the conclusion of his quest required his presence, but this time around it felt more like his presence is what causes things to go as they do. Had he not been on that quest, had he not done the things he’d done, the parties that come together for the conclusion wouldn’t have and thus their actions wouldn’t have the consequences that they do.

This is a really entertaining movie that even provides the opportunity for deeper reflection, which is pretty rare for these holiday horror flicks. I will say that it doesn’t feel particularly Christmasy. Yes, it takes place literally on Christmas Eve, but that feels incidental to the plot. Christmas doesn’t feel present here, so while I’d recommend it in general, and I do, I don’t know that I’d recommend including it on a holiday horror playlist unless you wanted to include a movie that would both be a surprise and actually good.

4.5/5 priests pursuing that pernicious pitch-pusher

El Día de la Bestia 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

Awful Advent #2: A Cadaver Christmas (2011)

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

For this year’s second entry, we have the movie that sparked the idea for the Awful Advent, A Cadaver Christmas!

A bartender and his final customer for the night are watching TV on Christmas Eve when the janitor from the university down the road walks in covered in blood. They ask the janitor to tell them his story while they wait for the police to arrive; he says the university has been taken over by “cadavers.” A police officer with a pervert handcuffed in the back of his car arrives, but the quintet are attacked by three cadavers that must have followed the janitor. The five return to the university to confirm the janitor’s story and to address the threat any way they can.

The 13-movies-in-13-days concept originated from this film’s website, although they call it the “13 Days of Spooky Christmas” (which may be the better title, but I like alliteration). Their movie marathon culminated in an Xmas party with gifts and a horror-themed potluck along with, naturally, a screening of their own movie, which sounds like a real hoot. By the time I’d been introduced to their movie, I’d already been doing my own solstice parties with sundown-to-sunup movie marathons and this flick was a welcome addition to my repertoire (their list of holiday horror films was also a welcome source for inspiration as I see that, unexpectedly, my list this year shares five films with their 2017 one).

As for the movie itself, it’s a scrappy little zombie indie that’s more focused on comedy than on gore or horror, but that’s all right as the jokes, apart from an uncomfortable necrophilia sequence that seems present just for the sake of nudity, generally land. There’s a nice recurring joke about calling 911 that is timed in such a way that it comes back right as I've forgotten about it. The film is very capably composed.

It seems unfair to refer to “the flaws” of this movie. Rather, the seams are visible if you want to look for them. The acting’s not very good. It’s purposefully heightened to make fun of tropes like the working-class tough guy and the at-his-end’s-wit cop, but just feels like they’re trying to do those roles and failing, like they're trying to be camp, and if you try, then you're not. The pacing is a touch wonky with lots of flashbacks of the janitor explaining what happened to set everything in motion. The movie feels like it would be stronger if it were simply told chronologically—the cadavers start walking around, the janitor fights them, and then goes to the bar which sets everything in motion. On this rewatch I got the sense that the flashbacks were a short film done as a proof-of-concept or something shopped around to get investors, and I think that may be the case as the closing credits note that this was adapted from a short made for the 48 Hour Film Project.

Like I said, the seams are visible if you look for them, but you have to look. The movie is buoyed by a sincere and legitimate wit and the filmmakers are very adept at working within their limitations. I noted that Black Friday is palpably hampered by budgetary and COVID restrictions to that movie’s detriment, and A Cadaver Christmas, guaranteed, didn’t have the budget or resources that film had. However, it seems fuller somehow, more memorable and competently made.

Obviously, this is not my first time with this movie. I’ve enjoyed it every time I’ve seen it and I know I’m going to watch it again. I just ordered the (sadly) out-of-print DVD off eBay so that I wouldn’t have to repeat this year’s tactic of streaming it on Tubi. It’s disappointing that this isn’t on more streaming services or available on VOD for purchase or rent because it is one of the more charming holiday horror movies out there. The movie is inventive, funny, and should really be seen more.

4/5 blood-soaked janitors

A Cadaver Christmas is currently available for streaming with ads on Tubi

Awful Advent 2021 #1: Black Friday (2021)

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

Starting off Awful Advent, a movie about the “official” start of the Xmas season, Black Friday—and it’s a brand-new movie to boot!

The movie starts on Thanksgiving with an employee at a big box store setting up decorations for the next day’s sales as customers chaotically mill about outside. You can hear muffled shouting, see running silhouettes, and one person flings themselves at the frosted glass of the door while howling.

While he’s hanging a banner, a meteorite smashes through the roof. When he goes to investigate, he finds a pulsating tumorous pink blob with a proboscis which proceeds to spray white goo all over his face (phrasing). He screams as we cut away.

His managers walk the floor, complaining that he hasn’t completed hanging the decorations. They notice something strange, approach, and get attacked by the monster that he’s become.

You get the set-up: a meteorite carrying some alien biology crashes on Earth and starts turning people into monsters. The twist is that it’s happening at a big box store on Black Friday, immediately suggesting parallels between the kinds of customers who would go shopping over that holiday weekend and flesh-eating zombies. Nice enough setup for a horror comedy because it's impossible for it to take itself too seriously with that premise.

On top of all of this, the film features Bruce Campbell as both the store manager and as a producer suggesting we’re going to get some nice Evil Dead/Army of Darkness zombie antics. While the zombies do look decidedly like Deadites, the movie never quite rises to the occasion.

One issue is the film feels very lackadaisical. Not restrained, but like no one is quite giving 100%. To put it another way, it feels like we’re watching the dress rehearsal: everyone knows their part and is hitting their mark, but they’re saving their energy for the next take, the real one, the one that will count. A specific example of this is a scene where the clerks are running from the zombie horde. The zombies look like they’re not so much shambling after the heroes as they are traipsing and clearly making sure they don’t get too close during the shot.

Another issue that compounds that not-quite-100% problem is the film feels, physically, half-empty. The setting is a Toys ‘R’ Us/Best Buy type store, but the shelves are very far apart from each other and sparsely stocked. Because of that, the movie never feels claustrophobic like it should and the characters never feel hemmed in—something necessary for this kind of horror. Likewise, the store never feels crowded. Despite the sequence of all sorts of people coming through the front doors at midnight, we never see a packed store, never see staff trying to maneuver around customers, never even see a line at the registers.

The former we can chalk up to budget restrictions, the latter to COVD restrictions: doesn’t matter if you can afford a lot of extras to stuff into a confined space, you’re (rightly) not allowed to.

All of which is a real shame because it’s not a bad movie, it’s just not where it could be. The underlying metaphor of Black Friday shoppers as a violent threatening mass is both unsubtle and well-chosen. The best zombie movie metaphors tend to track with real-life situations. Plus, just narratively, a massive shopping crowd is going to be moving in strange and unexpected ways so a zombie outbreak could begin in one without the heroes knowing or noticing. You could wring out some real humor and horror with the audience seeing what’s happening while the characters remain ignorant.

Speaking of the characters, these are well-drawn, well-acted, and have some sincerely good moments. There’s a quiet portion where the characters reflect on working in retail. A line that really hit for me was, “Imagine making your living at the place you begged your mom and dad to take you to when you were younger.” The movie isn’t going for the glib, “retail sucks and it’s the customers’ fault” take. Instead, it speaks, just briefly, but enough, and precisely, about what is despairing about that kind of work and how inertia can take over.

Also, how management are a bunch of smarmy, abusive, sadistic pricks which leads us to Bruce Campbell as the store manager. I love Bruce Campbell in everything and he knows the role he’s playing here—smarmy, snarky, cowardly. This really is Ash promoted to upper management. Just as the rest of the movie, though, it’s a little dialed down.

Another instance of “more please” is Michael Jai White, of course. The only film that comes close to having enough Michael Jai White is Black Dynamite and even that’s debatable. He’s a fantastic actor, performer, and presence, and is asked to do nothing here. He doesn’t even get a good death. He just disappears between shots.

I feel like I’m being overly-critical of this movie. Initially I thought I wouldn’t have anything to say about it and here I am at nearly 1000 words. Nothing in this movie is bad, they don’t get anything wrong (even the things that feel wrong, like Executive Producer Devon Sawa having a relationship with the 20-year-younger female lead, are actually addressed and used to good effect), it’s just that everything they get right isn’t quite there. I liked everything this movie had, but it didn’t have enough of any of it.

In the end, it’s fine if you come across it on cable or a streaming service, all right to have on in the background at your solstice party, but not something to hunt down or to add to your annual holiday rotation.

3/5 Kaiju Karens Complaining About Coupons

Black Friday is available for purchase or rental from various online services