Christmas Bloody Christmas by writer/director Joe Begos, is a very odd slasher flick for me. It has all the staples of a slasher movie you would want: gory kills, campy acting that isn’t over the top, and a story that makes just enough sense to suspend disbelief but isn’t so far out there to make me just want to turn it off.
The story goes like this: a music store owner named Tori, played by the talented Riley Dandy, is convinced by her long-time employee, Robbie (the equally gifted Sam Delich), to blow off a Tinder date to drink and hang out with him instead. After a quick stop at the local toy store to visit some friends who have decided to stay late for a drunken sex filled night after hours at the store, they are off to the bar. The thing is, the toy store is where they are shown a somewhat creepy electronic Santa that is very popular because it does all the stuff a normal store Santa does, except it isn’t a real person. Personally, I took this as a shot at unfettered capitalism and how companies would rather get rid of an employee and use (quite literally in this case) repurposed military equipment to save money than hire an old man to play Santa.
At the bar, you can hear on the TV that there has been a recall on these Santas because some of them have been reverting back to their original programming. This obviously can’t mean anything bad for our drunk sex fiend friends back at the store, right? Yeah, they are about to get killed mid-coiatis. Tori and Robbie are leaving the bar around this time on their way back to Tori’s house, and assume they are just having a great time.
This, of course, leads to the eventual sex between our main characters, and this is where I need to give a shout-out to Joe. Movies like this tend to take sex scenes and turn them into an excuse to just show a ton of nudity for the sake of having nudity, and this is done quite well. Very little actual nudity ( and this is assuming you consider a thong nudity)
My only real issue comes down to the massive amount of false finishes with the villain. They start at around halfway through the movie, and I completely understand the concept of building suspense and building to a climax and building hope, etc. There does come a point when you are no longer building anything, and you are simply killing momentum for an audience.
I can only watch Mecha Santa get hit by so many cars or take so many shotgun blasts that “kill him” so many times before I don’t care if he gets up or not, and by the time Tori actually kills him, I didn’t care who died as long as the movie ended. I went from rooting for Tori to rooting for the movie to just end. I started out enjoying the movie, but by the end, I simply didn’t care. It isn’t the acting or even the story; it is simply a matter of how they chose to play it out. More deaths and fewer false deaths for Santa would have gone a long way. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.
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