Christmas Bloody Christmas Review (2022)

If The Terminator meeting Silent Night, Deadly Night sounds like a good time, it’s not. Well, at least not by the way of Christmas Bloody Christmas. The primary issue, and it’s a big one, is that it’s literally painful to watch. The film uses primarily black and neon lights, and it burnt my retinas, so unless you’ve got a bottle of Visine handy, I’d advise against it. If that doesn’t sound appealing enough, the characters are abysmal. There is not one character who you want to survive or who you want to know more about. The two main characters, Tori and Robbie, are annoying wanna be know-it-all metalheads. I guess because they work in a record shop, they’re expected to have that arrogance about them. The dialogue is both annoying and frustrating as every other word is something profane and as someone who swears a lot, making that complaint says something. They’re also trying too hard to be edgy and cool and come off as unlikable.

The premise itself is nothing remarkable – a defective animatronic Santa goes on a killing spree. It kills Tori and Robbie’s friends first and then it follows them throughout town until it gets its hands on them. The game of cat and mouse wears pretty thin by the end as there are too many false endings in where Santa is dead but then somehow rises once again. There’s a showdown at the town police station where it is stabbed, crushed and set ablaze under an ambulance and after all that, just sits up like Michael Myers. You know the end is really at hand when he starts shooting green lasers out of his eyes. The ending kind of reminded me of Jack Frost where the way to “kill” it is obvious, but also kind of clever. There are a couple of good kills, but I’m not sure that justifies spending almost an hour and a half with it.