ann hale looks at a christmas stinker…
Tonight’s film came highly recommended. Everyone seems to love it, so I’ve decided to give it a shot. Troma film Christmas Evil is regarded the best Christmas horror film out there. Let’s see if it can live up to the hype.
Its Christmas, 1980, and two little boys, Harry and Philip, and their mother sit on the stairs watching Santa come down the chimney and unload presents from his bag. When Santa hears the boys giggling, he goes back up the chimney and rides away on his sleigh. The Harry refuses to believe that Santa is actually his father, as his brother claims, and sneaks downstairs to see if Santa has returned. Here he finds Santa and his mother engaged in a certain sex act, learning Santa is a fake, which apparently screws him up.
As an adult, Harry is obsessed with Santa. His pajamas are a Santa suit, his apartment is decorated in Santa memorabilia, he is a manager in a toy factory and he spends his mornings snooping on the children in his neighborhood with binoculars from the rooftop so he can make his own naughty and nice list.
Harry begins to go a little [more] insane. He makes his own Santa suit and paints a Christmas sleigh on his van. When he realizes that people aren’t taking Christmas as serious as they should by focusing only on profit and not on the children, he snaps. Harry superglues a Santa beard to his face, steals toys from his factory and delivers them to the children’s hospital that his toy company was supposed to donate presents to.
This is the slowest moving “horror” movie I have ever seen. It takes 50 minutes for anything violent to happen, which is when he searches out the men that promised toys to the hospital and attacks them with an axe. Then it’s another 15 minutes before anything else happens. Finally, about 20 minutes later, parents form a mob and go after Santa Harry but that leads to absolutely nothing.
http://youtu.be/_uAMtjDXXhs
The only cool thing about the whole movie is Jeffrey DeMunn, who you would know best as Dale from The Walking Dead. He is young, thin and his eyebrows are unruly even then. His role is small and ultimately unnecessary to the film.
I don’t understand why people like this movie so much. It’s awful and I love Troma films. The guy is messed up because his mom got a mustache ride from Santa? Thank God it wasn’t the Easter Bunny. We all know how those bunnies go at it.
Plain and simple, this movie sucked. Find something better to watch this Christmas.
