Krampus Unleashed (2016)
Starring Amelia Brantley, Bryson Hall, Caroline Lassetter, Travis Amery
Written and directed by Robert Conway
In case you haven’t figured it out yet by all the holiday merchandise that has already been up in stores since before Halloween, the Christmas season is now in full swing. For horror fans, that means the beginning of what is looking to become a new annual tradition: shitty Krampus movies.
St. Nicholas’ hairy horned punisher of the naughty, according to Alpine folklore, is rapidly becoming the niche B-movie monster of the moment, at least during the Yuletide season. Alas, for every Krampus flick like Michael Dougherty’s fun but greatly flawed Krampus, there’s an increasing number of greatly flawed but not much fun low-budget Krampus flicks like Krampus Unleashed.
I went into this one mostly blind, having only seen the eye-catching artwork and the trailer with a guy in make-up and monster suit that gave me hope for some old school creature feature entertainment. I really wanted to like this one, but alas…
On the positive side, Krampus Unleashed is far from the worst Krampus movie I’ve seen the past year or so. That dishonor still goes to the unwatchable Krampus: The Christmas Devil, which somehow spawned a sequel I cannot bring myself to watch. That movie deserved to be beaten with rusty chains and tossed into the fires of cinematic hell.
As for Krampus Unleashed, at the very least it deserves a few whacks of its own with a birch branch for wasting so much time. When your movie is only 75 minutes but feels longer because so little happens for so long, that will definitely get you on my naughty list.
THE YEAR WAS 1898, AND THE WEST WAS STILL WILD.
I must admit those were not the first words I expected to appear on the screen at the outset of a Krampus movie. It also gave me false hope that maybe this was going to be something a little different from other Krampus movies. Actually, it was, just in the least imaginative way possible. For the most part this isn’t even a Krampus movie.
That the monster is Krampus means next to nothing outside of the physical look of the creature and an origin that has him unleashed when a flame comes into contact with the magical summoning stone St. Nicholas used to punish pagans in ancient times. With so much rich folklore surrounding the Krampus legend, I found it especially egregious the filmmakers chose to use virtually none of it. This Krampus may as well have been just a werewolf or Sasquatch. No birch rod. No chains. No sack tossing children to hell. Just random people getting disemboweled, decapitated, and delimbed by the claws and fangs of a growling beastman. Some dimwit hunters even think the creature they’re after is Bigfoot because, why not? Might as well have been since this is the least Krampus-y Krampus I’ve seen in a movie to date.
To its credit, the Krampus costume is a pretty solid old school man-in-suit/make-up creation brought to life by a performer up to the task. Even the practical gore effects are fairly well done. But that’s about all this one has going for it, and there’s not even enough killer Krampus action to skirt by on such a short running time. After a prolonged prologue, Krampus won’t appear again until more than a half-hour later. Even when Krampus does appear to do something very naughty to someone, the death scenes cut away from the gooey action so abruptly you can almost hear tire screeching sounds.
Notice I haven’t mentioned anything about the plot or the characters yet – with good reason. I think there was more plot in the opening onscreen texts than the actual movie that followed, at least until they meet an old man towards the end who regales them with the remainder of the plot.
What goes on in between is a comedy, I think. I know I wasn’t laughing. We have two different families – one nice, the other jerks – meeting up in a desert location for what looks like the worst Christmas vacation ever long before a mythological monster starts killing everyone. Honestly, there’s very little plot to speak of, but speak they do. You can’t shut these monotone-voiced people up.
One last reason why Krampus Unleashed ended up on my naughty list: the riveting subplot about a cop who somehow always seems to be two steps behind the rest of the movie. All those scenes of him investigating Krampus deaths build to the big payoff at the end when (SPOILER WARNING!) he pulls up in his car just moments after the survivors have defeated Krampus and offers to give them a ride home. That was time well spent.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
