‘Christmas Bloody Christmas’ Gives the Gift of a Totally Metal Santa Claus, To Mixed Results [Review]
Drew Tinnin
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Killer robots are already in the news this holiday season, thanks to an attempt by the San Francisco Police Department to start arming robot patrols to monitor the unhoused population. The policy has received enough backlash to go on the back burner for now. But that doesn’t mean that this is the last time the public will hear about the controversial idea. Until that major indicator of a future dystopia comes to fruition, a robotic killer Santa Claus will have to suffice.
Christmas Bloody Christmas is a drunken, ultra violent sci-fi horror melee that never lets up for one minute of its crisp, 87-minute runtime. The new exploitation homage from director Joe Begos takes the concept of a malfunctioning, life-size animatronic St. Nick and sends it straight off the rails. The artificial snowfall and fluorescent neon that bathe the weirdly abandoned streets give a dreamlike quality to what’s essentially a non-stop chase movie. By the ending, there’s a level of exhaustion that sets in after one too many failed attempts to take Santa offline.
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To be fair, the intense brutality that the two main characters, record store owner Tori Tooms (Riley Dandy) and her buddy Robbie (Sam Delich), endure through the course of Christmas Bloody Christmas purposely wears you out. After a night out on an otherwise peaceful Christmas Eve, Tori winds up getting wasted and hooking up with someone she probably shouldn’t.
That should be the culmination of another drunken night that would normally just end in regret. Then, a short-circuited, in-store mechanical Santa (Abraham Benrubi) comes up the steps and starts killing everyone. By the time the carnage starts, Tori and Robbie feel like genuine friends you could hang out with, taking shots and talking about the many merits of the Pet Sematary Two soundtrack (which they do in-depth). That level of camaraderie goes a long way when it’s time to root for Tori to come out victorious.
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After a long line of solid indie horror projects including Bliss, Almost Human, and VFW, Begos definitely knows how to make a movie like Christmas Bloody Christmas stand out. Head-splitting practical effects, well-timed car explosions, and a flurry of toe-to-toe battles keep the tension up. But the endless pursuit from the singular Santa gets redundant fast.
Based on a report in the evening news in Christmas Bloody Christmas, it appears that there is a national recall for a potentially vast number of animatronic Santas that went haywire. What’s happening in Tori’s town could be happening everywhere. Did an evil toy company cut corners manufacturing the freshly activated killers? That’s never explored. It’s just a means to an end.
And that’s fine. The pacing of Christmas Bloody Christmas just starts to suffer when the non-stop showdown doesn’t ever seem to, you know, stop. Right when the mayhem begins to wind down, it just ramps right back up again.
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So, by the time the last drag out fight occurs, it’s a little too much of a good thing. In loving nods to Hardware and James Cameron’s Terminator, the finale almost looks like a shot-for-shot remake of Sarah Connor’s nail biting fight for survival against a relentless T-800 endoskeleton. As a result, Christmas Bloody Christmas struggles to find its identity at times. Begos’ exploitation homage still, however, has no problem delivering a new holiday horror staple for genre fans. It’s our version of a Hallmark movie, for better or worse.
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Christmas Bloody Christmas
Summary
A night of debauchery becomes deadly when a killer robot Santa Claus stalks a resilient record store owner on Christmas Eve. One of them turns out to be more indestructible than the other.
