Mainlining Christmas

I found the key to unraveling this bizarre religious horror/action movie buried in its Wikipedia article: prior to falling in the hands of director Peter Hyams, End of Days was apparently offered to Sam Raimi and Guillermo del Toro, either of which would most likely have turned the seemingly bonkers premise of pitting Arnold Schwarzenegger against the devil into the amusingly bonkers farce it deserved to be. But they were both busy (or perhaps uninterested), resulting in Hyams taking over the project. To his credit, Hyams proves capable of delivering a sleek, visually impressive movie. The effects are solid, including some early CG that (mostly) avoids the pitfalls of looking cheesy or dated. But none of that means much, because he doesn't seem to be in on the joke here. Despite some objectively ridiculous dialogue, names lamp-shading campy origins (for Christ's sake, there's a priest named Thomas Aquinas), and - again - Schwarzenegger blasting the devil with enough firepow...

All the Creatures Were Stirring is a low-budget horror anthology movie released directly to Shudder in 2018 written and directed by Rebekah McKendry and David Ian McKendry, who (as you probably guessed from their names) are married. As is often the case with low-budget productions, any discussion of the movie's quality is going to be riddled with caveats and sidenotes. Depending on what you're comparing this to, what you expect out of it, and how steep of a curve you're grading on, you could describe this as fantastic, horrible, or just about anything in between. The movie features five short films and a frame story, all of which is packed into a brisk hour twenty minutes. Unsurprisingly, that means the individual stories aren't given a great deal of space to breathe. For the most part, the characters are pretty one-dimensional, though that's not necessarily a bad thing here. The collection is basically comprised of short genre stories, each of which serves to offer...

Like its predecessor, the second Adult Swim Yule Log movie takes a lot of risks. But while this is ultimately a solid comedy/horror (leaning a lot more towards comedy this time), those risks don't pay off to anywhere near the same degree. It's probably unfair to expect otherwise, though: the first installment in this franchise felt revolutionary and exciting, essentially materializing a horror film from literal smoke. Even those of us not lucky enough to stumble on it organically when it aired advertised as a literal Yule Log video could sense the energy and excitement. That's just not here this time. While the movie has some very good and fairly original ideas, it ultimately feels much more conventional. This is a campy Christmas horror movie in the vein of Jack Frost (with the caveat I enjoyed this much more). It's got some practical creature and gore effects, an interesting premise exploring genre signifiers as a metaphor for trauma, and another good performance fro...

Okay, we'll start with the world's silliest spoiler warning, because this Christmas ghost story  technically  has a twist ending, but you probably already know what it is. No, really, regardless of whether you've even heard of this, without knowing the premise or anything about it aside from the fact it's got ghosts in it and it was made in 2003, the thing you're expecting is the thing it does, to the point I'm honestly unsure whether it was even intended as an actual twist, a meta-commentary on how common those became following the success of The Sixth Sense, or even a gimmick to ensure every single person in the audience gets an endorphin rush as their suspicions are confirmed. But, again, structurally the movie ends with a twist reveal and the bulk of the film is executed quite well, so... if you want to be surprised when it's revealed the near-collision at the start of the movie was actually a crash which killed all but one of the main characters, I reco...

The last fifteen years has seen a number of attempts to adapt northern European Christmas folklore into horror. Rare Exports  gave us a version of the Yule Goat, both A Christmas Horror Story and  Krampus  (as well as numerous low-budget horror flicks) have played with the now iconic demon (though I'd argue the character in the latter more closely resembles the Yule Goat, but that's a subject for another time), and another installment in the aforementioned  A Christmas Horror Story  was inspired by the tomte (which is essentially another name for the nisse). And of course there's the Danish series, Nisser , which Netflix picked up and rebranded, "Elves." Looking further back, there's a strong case to be made that  Gremlins  was in part inspired by the same lore, albeit filtered through WWII stories and the mind of Roald Dahl. Regardless, put a pin in Gremlins, because we'll be circling back. There's Something in the Barn represents a somewhat mo...

I'm not sure how this one snuck by me two years ago. I don't recall having heard of it once before buzz around the sequel put it on my radar. Then again, maybe I just glossed over it at the time, assuming that whatever it was, it wasn't worth my time. By design, this movie - and make no mistake, it is a feature-length horror/comedy movie - was designed to fly under the radar and build on word-of-mouth. Ideally, that and a recommendation are enough to pique your interest. If so... just go watch it. Need a little more encouragement? The closest things I can compare this to are John Dies at the End and Twin Peaks. Especially Twin Peaks. This thing has Twin Peaks energy spilling out of its fireplace. If either or both of those are things that appeal to you, there's a good chance you're going to be pleasantly surprised by this gonzo production. "Gonzo" is the right word, too. This was greenlit by Adult Swim and financed through a slush fund to keep higher-ranki...

There are quite a few movies named, "Silent Night," so - just to be sure we're all on the same page - the one we're looking at today concerns a Christmas gathering coinciding with an apocalyptic event in which a massive toxic cloud is sweeping over the globe killing every living human and animal in its wake. The movie is sort of a jumble of genres, incorporating comedy, drama, horror, and science fiction. By far the most famous member of the cast is Keira Knightley, who - between this and the criminally underrated Seeking a Friend for the End of the World - is amassing a background in the quirky apocalypse microgenre. Unfortunately, this doesn't work anywhere near as well as Seeking a Friend, though there's still a great deal to appreciate here. The movie's narrative is almost entirely focused on a group of adult friends and their children who are coming together for a Christmas celebration/suicide party. The poisonous cloud I mentioned earlier isn't q...

For better or worse (or more accurately first for better then subsequently for worse) this 2009 movie written and directed by Richard Kelly (the Donnie Darko guy) based on the 1970 short story by the legendary Richard Matheson leaves you utterly perplexed as to what it is you're actually watching. "Button, Button" (the story it's adapted from) is fairly straightforward as far as these things go, based on the idea a box is dropped off containing a button which if pressed will result in a financial payout but also the death of someone the presser doesn't know. In the original story, the death was the husband of the woman who pressed the button (the loophole being she supposedly never really knew him); when this was adapted for the Twilight Zone series in the '80s, they altered the ending to instead imply the next recipient would be someone the previous holders didn't know. This... I mean.... Okay, spoiler warning, I guess. This isn't a movie I'll be ...

This 1972 TV suspense movie is mainly notable for two things: having a bizarrely impressive cast, and for being well ahead of the curve by delivering what's essentially a Christmas slasher before "slasher" even coalesced into a subgenre. This beat Black Christmas by two years, though it's worth acknowledging that being first is the only  metric in which this could ever seriously be said to "beat" Black Christmas. Not that it's a fair comparison: Home for the Holidays was made for the ABC Movie of the Week series, not a theatrical release. Which of course raises the question of how much of a curve we should be grading this on. It's not bad for what it is, but "what it is" isn't exactly good. There's not much tension, it's not at all scary, and the characters aren't particularly entertaining outside of the novelty of seeing Sally Field, Eleanor Parker, Jessica Walter, and Julie Harris in a proto-slasher TV movie produced by A...

I actually wasn't going to write this one up. My initial reaction was this film had some interesting moments set at Christmas, but for a number of reasons neither qualified as a "Christmas movie" (at least by my definitions) or leveraged the holidays in ways that were thematically noteworthy enough to count. Obviously neither of those reactions reflect on the movie itself, which is a fantastic (albeit disturbing) entry in the Italian Giallo movement, a sort of quasi-genre that paved the way for the modern slasher and has influenced countless films across virtually every genre. But the movie got me wondering whether there were any Giallos that used the holidays in a more sustained manner, so I did a simple web search for "Giallo Christmas movie" to see if anything popped up. And the only thing that did was Deep Red. While I didn't (and still don't) really consider this a Christmas movie, articles on Collider and Slash Film  were more generous in their la...