Mainlining Christmas

Not to be confused with any of the scores of non-Ukrainian-horror movies with the same title, this centers around a woman trapped on a desolate mountainside in Georgia (the country, not the state) being hunted by someone on a snowmobile. The movie has a couple merits - we'll get to those - but on the whole this is style over substance where the style gets old quickly. Director and co-writer Stanislav Kapralov is trying to create a modern Christmas ghost story, but he's stretching material appropriate for a short into a full length movie. By the time we get to the end, we've figured out the two or three twists the movie could take, and when we get to the final reveal, there's no way it can't be anticlimactic. The movie, which features five significant characters and maybe twice as many bit parts, probably didn't cost an awful lot to make, but it had the resources for some realistic (and at times disturbing) make-up effects. Visually, it compares to US movies with...