Mainlining Christmas

Await Further Instructions is a low-budget Christmas horror flick exploring themes around surveillance, authority, religion, terrorism and the ways liberalism versus conservativism view these ideas. Despite a small cast and virtually the entire movie being relegated to a single house, there are a lot of ideas being played with, which is a bit of a double-edged sword. The movie is engrossing, but by the end credits it left me a little confused what, if anything, it was trying to say. That's not automatically a problem - movies which pose questions without answering them can absolutely work, particularly in this genre. But this one feels allegorical in a way that left me digging for a message or point I don't think was delivered (or at least not clearly enough to be satisfying). On top of that, the movie chooses to make its characters simplistic in ways that prevent them from having strong arcs. Again, that's not a dealbreaker, but it places more weight on plot reveals to mak...

I'd say this low-budget sci-fi/horror flick was surprisingly good, but the truth is I chose it among a list of other low-budget Christmas movies because it had an unusually good reputation. Despite having the hallmarks of a small production - contained setting, small cast, mostly shot in the dark - this one manages to deliver a solid survivalist horror movie. The caveat to that is Alien Raiders doesn't deliver anything on top of this: the movie is a good entry in the genre, but it's not subverting, advancing, or transforming that genre in any way. If you've seen movies like this before (and if you're watching something called Alien Raiders, you almost certainly have), you also know the plot beats, premise, and twists. I'm not trying to take anything away from this movie or what first-time director Ben Rock was able to accomplish. Low-budget horror flicks are dime-a-dozen, and they're almost never handled with anywhere near this level of skill. This practical...

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...

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 ...

Let's acknowledge up front that this isn't something I'd call a Christmas movie, though it comes significantly closer than I'd have expected. Things to Come is a 1936 British science-fiction film directed by William Cameron Menzies and scripted by... hold on... got to check my notes here... some guy named H. G. Wells. Anyone heard of him? Things to Come doesn't have a typical narrative. While the movie sort of has a lead actor, his characters (he plays a couple) are really just standing in for an ideology. The real main character is the fictional city of "Everytown" (subtle!) which evolves and changes over the course of a century. The movie is less interested in its human characters than it is in speculating on the arcs of history. This is quite literally Wells's vision of a possible future, augmented with absolutely astonishing sets and visual effects that often left me scrambling to figure out how shots were achieved. That qualifies as a recommendati...

Fairly high concept for a Hallmark movie, this is about a screenwriter scripting a remake of a classic Hollywood Christmas movie getting magically transported back to the production of said movie in 1947 and falling in love with its tragically doomed star. If all that sounds a tad over-ambitious for a studio known for cranking out relatively uniform (but surprisingly high-quality) low-budget television movies... well... that is an issue here. While A Biltmore Christmas is decent, it's clear they're biting off a bit more than they can chew. Watching, you can tell everyone involved is putting in real effort, but you can see where they just didn't have the time to set up complex shots, learn more than surface-level impersonations of characters from classic Hollywood films, or nail the look and feel of the era they were emulating. I don't think any of that is necessarily a dealbreaker, depending on what you want out of this. This is, after all, a TV Christmas movie, and in ...

Aside from knowing the basic premise, quite literally every expectation and assumption I had going into this movie about an animatronic store Santa malfunctioning and going on a murder spree turned out to be dead wrong. Fortunately, one of those assumptions was that I probably wouldn't like it all that much, and... Okay, let's do the spoiler warning right off the bat, because this is one I'm absolutely recommending to fans of horror, who might want to experience it without realizing what they're getting into. I was about to say that recommendation only  applies to horror fans, as the movie's content is decidedly R-rated (both in terms of sex and violence), but this isn't exactly my go-to genre and I loved it despite... well... it gets pretty gruesome at times, even if the gore has an intentionally anachronistic look.  (Editor's note: this is not a case where we are united in our opinion. I admit that I generally detest slashers, but this is no exception for ...