Mainlining Christmas

I've recently been looking at several action figures I ordered from Fresh Monkey Fiction's first wave of "Naughty or Nice" line. The first two - Classic Santa and Zombie Santa - were absolute successes in my opinion. I'm going to ruin a bit of the suspense by telling you upfront my opinion of the figure I'm looking at today, Krampus, is a bit more mixed. There are absolutely aspects I love, but it's the only one of the three I'm not entirely convinced was worth the price.   Part of it comes down to what that price was: the other two ran me $37 each, which is steep for the scale but - between the quality of the figures and the great accessories - not at all unreasonable. Krampus is one of the line's "deluxe" figures, which means he came with a few extra accessories, including a fabric cape and sack. But it also meant the price tag jumped to $50, which is pushing what I expect high-end figures in this scale to go for. I should probably ac...

Calling Two Front Teeth, a Christmas horror/comedy hybrid about a vampiric Santa and his elves, low budget is a bit of an understatement (or perhaps I should say overstatement, as I suspect the filmmakers had less money than even the phrase "low budget" usually implies). This is a micro-budget horror film that looks more like an ambitious student project than an independent production, the sort of movie produced by friends on nights and weekends. That, of course, makes it difficult to review, because barring a handful of miracles that launched careers with projects like these, films at this level are virtually incapable of competing with those made with actual resources. And since no one's talking about this the way they discuss El Mariachi or The Blair Witch Project, you already know it's not one of the exceptions. At the same time, there's a great deal to appreciate here, starting with that premise (credit where it's due - they beat me to the idea by six yea...

I wrote this up before , though I was feeling far from charitable at the time. In my defense, we started this blog coming at Christmas media from a very different point of view, so our early reviews were intended more as brief recommendations or warnings for modern audiences. We weren't particularly interested in analyzing these, nor were we remotely experienced enough to have done so. Eight years later, I find this stuff far more interesting, and - while I'm still no expert in early cinema - watching bucketloads of this stuff at least provides me with a little context. Compared to most silent Christmas media I've come across, Santa Claus Vs. Cupid is notable for having a great deal of plot crammed into its 16-minute runtime. It also has a great deal of filler and side characters, which makes the short feel larger but also makes the narrative difficult to follow. Ultimately, there are really only four significant characters: Jack, Edward, Binks, and the unnamed love interes...

Yesterday, I looked at last year's "Classic Santa" figure from Fresh Monkey Fiction , a small toy company producing - among other things - a line of Christmas action figures. When I ordered the Classic Santa, I also picked up a couple other figures, including the one I'm looking at today. Only in this case, "one" isn't entirely accurate, as this comes with an alternate set of hands and a head sculpt allowing you to effectively choose between two very different figures: the Zombie Santa promised on the package, or a sort of psycho-Santa. As I said in my last review, the box is pretty straightforward. I threw mine out a few minutes after snapping some pictures, but anyone who wants to keep their figures in the original packaging has something that will look good on the shelf. The body is a simple repaint of the Classic Santa, though they went to some notable effort to differentiate them. The coat is a darker color, almost halfway to purple compared to the ...

This might be the last holiday movie I remember seeing as a child that we'd yet to get around to. The reason it took so long was, despite remembering a handful of moments and details, I had no idea what this was called. My best guess is that I probably watched this sometime in 1985 or 1986, possibly on VHS at a daycare I went to back then, though any of those details could be wrong. What's clearer was my reaction to the movie: I remember being mostly bored by the thing. And unfortunately, that assessment holds up pretty well. This TV movie has an obnoxiously slow pace, some awful directing, and very little action. In short, this isn't worth tracking down despite a surprising number of merits. I'm feeling jolly, so let's run through those first. This uses some solid matte paintings, backdrops, and miniature work to create the North Pole (technically North Pole City, but I said we were going to cover the good stuff first). Actually, that may be selling these features ...

I'm grouping these two animated shorts from Ladislaw Starewicz, a pioneer of stop-motion, together despite them being made more than four decades apart. Both films are fairly easy to locate online and well worth tracking down. The Insect's Christmas (1911) I believe The Insect's Christmas is the first animated Christmas movie ever made, or at least the earliest surviving example. The Insect's Christmas is sort of a whimsical fairytale that admittedly becomes a bit less whimsical when you realize the titular insects are dead bugs whose legs have been replaced with wires, but it's worth overlooking that unpleasant detail. Before we get to the insects, the movie opens with a Father Christmas ornament coming alive on a Christmas tree and climbing down, accidentally shattering an ornament and waking a sleeping doll in the process. He travels outside and conjures a Christmas tree using his staff. Next, he uses his staff to clear away rocks and even break open the ground, ...

For a variety of reasons, it's been a while since I last reviewed a toy. We really don't have room for me to collect the way I used to, the blog's focus shifted more towards movies, and - frankly - after a while, I felt like I was repeating the same basic descriptions I'd written a thousand times before. Also, we rarely saw much interest in those posts relative to the time it took to write them. That's why you don't see reviews of random toys the way you used to in the early years of this blog. However, once in a while something special comes along. And that brings us to the "Naughty or Nice" line from Fresh Monkey Fiction. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of them - I hadn't either before these showed up on preorder a couple years ago. As far as I've been able to piece together, they're a small toy company specializing in original creations. And most importantly, they're the company that finally realized there'd be a mar...