Well, we’re scant weeks from the biggest holiday of the year and I sincerely hope that all of you out there in webland have been thoroughly enjoying yourselves. I would also like to take the time to thank you for clicking on a somewhat ambiguous link this week. I know I’m usually a more straightforward guy, but this setup was just too good to pass up! A couple of weeks ago, we talked about the best Christmas movie ever made, A Christmas Story. If you don’t agree, you’re not only wrong, you’re deluding yourself. Anyway, I had a schedule worked out for the entire month and for the second week in a row, we’re going off script. I guess my choices just weren’t as interesting in practice as they were in theory. As a result, your regularly scheduled review of Iron Man 3 will be preempted by my review of A Christmas Horror Story!
I know what you’re thinking already. You’re wondering just what the heck you’ve gotten yourself into, and what illicit drug I decided to experiment with this week. To answer the first question, you’ve officially given the beaten path the middle finger and told it where it can shove its… neatness. Second, shame on you! I don’t need drugs! I’m high on life! This may, however, seem like an odd choice, but I assure you that it is in keeping with the theme for this month, and you’ll see why. Finally, let me just say that this review comes as a result of my actually trying out some of my Netflix suggestions. You can draw any conclusions you want as to my taste in movies based on this one suggestion alone. I don’t care, I have no ego. Alright, I think I’ve warned you guys enough. Let’s get into this awesome Christmas experience!
ACHS, as I shall heretofore refer to it, is described by Netflix as an anthology film that tells four tales. I just want to say that if you go off of that description, you’ll be sorely mislead. There are four different stories going on, but they’re not told as separate vignettes. Instead, they’re pretty effectively woven together and told simultaneously. And they’re all related so anthology is a little bit of a stretch, but I’ll forgive it. The film opens on the North Pole after some pretty decent opening credits. Oh, and let me just say right now that this movie has a great score! We see Santa in the stable where he keeps the reindeer and he’s holding an axe. Then the doors to the stable burst open and we cut to… WILLIAM FREAKING SHATNER!!!! Shatner plays a small town radio DJ in this film and I’ll be honest, I decided to watch this movie based on his credit alone. I wasn’t disappointed either. He’s snarky and sarcastic with just a hint of cheese and obliviousness. I’d say it’s one of his better performances actually. Throughout the film, Shatner is the narrative glue that holds the entire story together. We cut periodically from the main stories to his character, whose station is supposed to be holding a food drive at the local mall. That’s important later.
Shatner gives us the setup and mentions off hand a tragedy that the town endured the previous year. Then we cut to three teens lurking outside a high school getting ready to investigate two deaths that had happened the year previous and which they’re doing a school report on. Mention is made of another teen who was supposed to have joined them. This girl shows up and gives the other three keys to the school and tells them that her father decided last minute to take a family trip. The three teens enter the school and start making their documentary video. They watch the actual crime scene video and they mention that one of the officers had taken personal leave after the event and had never come back. There’s a scare as they nearly get caught by the principal, but they get to the school’s basement and begin their investigation. They go to the room where two teens had died previously and take extensive video.
Next, we cut back to the girl who was supposed to have joined them. She and her family, as it turns out, are headed to visit an aunt that likes none of them. There’s bickering and snickering as everyone does their level best to get under everyone else’s skin, but the dad tries to quash it by exclaiming that he just wants some bonding time with his family for Christmas. As they’re driving down a remote and snow covered road, they pass a pickup truck. The focus changes to the truck as a family of three get out. There are two parents and young boy. They’re off in search of that elusive perfect tree. Having struck out at the commercial lots, they’re committing low level felonies instead as they sneak onto someone else’s private property to steal a tree. We stay on them until they come to a fence that is clearly marked “No Trespassing”. Then we cut to the North Pole. Santa and his elves are hard at work making sure that everything is ready for the big night and Mrs. Claus brings in cookies for everyone. Most of the elves dig in, except for one. After a little pushing, he says he just not hungry. Then after a bit more, he blows up at Mrs. Claus and slices his own hand open in the process. It’s at this point that I should tell you that this movie is not for the children. It’s gory, there’s a lot of swearing, and there are some suggestive scenes so tread with caution. After the elf slices his hand, he bleeds to death while spraying all of the other elves with his blood. After all of that settles down, a big deal is made about elves being unable to die.
Now we go back to the family who were going to visit their aunt. The meeting is tense and no one is talking except the dad as the aunt stares at him in annoyment. The son starts playing with a statue and the aunt scolds him pretty harshly. The aunt excuses herself and the son goes back to being an idiot. In the course of events the statue gets broken. A groundskeeper sees the incident and when the aunt returns he explains that it was an unfortunate accident. The family are told to leave immediately and they start off for home, but as they’re arguing, something bolts out in front of their car and they wind up spinning out into a ditch. Meanwhile the teens in the school basement finish their filming and attempt to leave only to find out that they’ve been locked in the basement. OH NO! So they start looking for other ways to get out of the school. We switch over to Shatner who is explaining that people should avoid the mall, and drinking rum as he puts on another song. Then we switch to the family getting the tree. They saw one down and head back for their truck. In the process, the son gets lost. They eventually find the son who had been hiding in the hollow of an old tree. The family gets home and they’re decorating the tree. This is when we find out that the dad is the police officer from the teen’s story who went on leave after the gruesome deaths the previous year. He’s attempting to repair his relationship with his family, but his son is having none of that. The mom decides that maybe the son needs dinner so she makes him spagheti. This kid just scarfs this spagheti right down. I really have to give kudos to the actor. He just shovels mouthful after mouthful without missing a beat or chewing! This ticks off the dad so mom puts the son to bed.
We’re back to the teens locked in the basement as they finally find a storage room where they can at least rest comfortably as they have failed to find a way out of the basement. They’re doing the typical speculation that one would expect from people in a dire situation and talking about who in their lives might think to alert authorities that they’re missing. One of the boys mentions that he’s supposed to be helping his dad run a food drive at the mall. They ultimately come to the conclusion that they’re going to be stuck for a while and start moving into their little makeshift storage squat. They discover the statues for a nativity scene. There’s some plodding filler, and then we jump back to the family with the aunt. They’re wandering through the woods trying to get back to town when they start to hear strange noises. The son mentions that perhaps it’s Krampus as the rest of the family look at him like he’s got a carrot growing out of his nose. Then there’s a loud shriek and a blur whizzes out of the shadows and wraps itself around the dad’s neck, and it yanks him through the air! Mom and daughter go to check on the dad as the son goes to retrieve a road flare that they’ had been using to light their journey, against the cautions of the mom, it should be noted. The son gets the flare, then another shriek as the son is quickly dragged into the shadows. The entire family, who as it’s been previously established are totally dysfunctional, decide that they should probably run, except the mom. I guess she’s alright after all. They run until they reach a church, which they hope will provide them with sanctuary, but the unseen menace whips the dad out of the church through a window using a chain. Mom and daughter hide in the confessional booth, but even that turns out to be futile and before they know it, they’re running again. Well, the daughter is. The mom makes a final stand and gets bitten right in half. It’s at this point that we finally get our first glimpse of the unseen menace, and sure enough, it’s Krampus, and I have to say, for a movie with so little budget, the makeup on this beast is fantastic!
It’s at this point that we’re back to the North Pole and Santa is groping blindly through the dark as he looks for Mrs. Claus. You hear foreboding noises as Santa makes his way through the darkness. He finally does find Mrs. Claus, but she cryptically tells him that it’s too late. Then we get the reveal as a bunch of zombie elves make a break to attack Santa. I swear this happens. Do I seem like the kind of person who could make this kind of thing up? So Santa, armed with just his walking staff, starts going all kung fu fighting on them. Conveniently, Santa’s walking stick has a razor sharp doohickey on the end of it so there are a lot of decapitations that take place at this point. When we cut back to tree family, mom and dad are having some tense words about how dad has been acting so dad goes to wallow in self pity on the couch. Mom checks on the son only to find him sleeping soundly. She gets an ominous phone call from an anonymous man who tells here that she needs to bring her son back to the woods. Refusing to believe the rantings of a lunatic, she hangs up. Meanwhile, the dad has taken to reviewing the case files for the deaths that have come up quite a bit and he’s also got his sidearm next to him at the kitchen table. The mom has drifted off to sleep, but is awoken by a nightmare. She checks on her son again, but he’s not in bed. She goes to the living room to find that her husband has been brutally murdered and her son is missing. So she calls the anonymous man back and he tells her that a changeling has replaced her son, and she must bring it back to the forest. She eventually subdues the creature by beating it several times with a baseball bat and shoving it into a duffle bag.
We cut to Shatner who mentions that there’s a hostage situation in progress at the mall, then we cut back to the teens as the one girl is trying to seduce one of the boys, who we found out toward the beginning is dating the girl who gave them the keys to the school before leaving to visit he aunt. He turns this girl down and we cut to the same girl entering the storage room with the nativity statues. It gets a little awkward as the girl seduces the other boy and they have a quickie. There’s nothing explicit, but it could be jarring to some. Afterward, the girl seems confused and upset. The two teens, to their merit, manage to talk through the events and come to the conclusion that what happened was no one’s fault. The boy asks where the other boy went, and the girl says she left him in the room where the deaths occurred. They got investigate only to find that he’s been brutally murdered. The girl figures out that she’d been possessed by the girl who had died the previous year, whose only wish was to have her baby. After this little revelation, a creepy dead girl appears and kills the one remaining boy. The girl is then let free. When we cut to the sole survivor of auntie family, the girl has returned to the aunt’s house and is trying to get in so that she can escape from Krampus. However, Krampus catches up to her. After a struggle she impales Krampus through the neck and lights him on fire! It’s only after all of this that the aunt lets the girl in the house because the aunt sucks. The aunt explains that Krampus is a spirit that can seize control of people with ugly feelings in their hearts and that that is what happened to the groundskeeper when the statue was broken. The girl figures out that the aunt only sent the family away because she knew that Krampus would hunt the family, which would keep the aunt safe, again because the aunt sucks. Following this revelation, the girl gets angry, morphs into Krampus and eats the aunt! Finally, we cut to the tree family. Mom returns the changeling, who again, has some great makeup! The mysterious man says that his family have owned the forest for generations and have acted as the guardians of the changelings. The mom, who is spooked and armed, asks where her son is and the man tells her that he doesn’t know and can’t help. She gets startled, and shoots the man. The changeling postures like he’s going to kill her and she pleads for her son back. So… The changeling enters the tree hollow and… releases her son… This seemed like a weird way to take that story at first, but I suppose that the changelings did owe her one for essentially freeing them to run amok.
Finally, we cut back to Santa at more or less the same moment that we encountered him at the beginning of the film. He’s got his axe and he’s prepping the sleigh for departure. The doors burst open with a blinding light and when the light subsides, Krampus is standing in the doorway! That’s right, this entire movie has been building to a knock down, drag out battle between Santa Claus and Krampus! And let me tell you, it doesn’t disappoint! The fight is super intense and really well choreographed. It appears to end on an anticlimactic note as Santa chops off one of Krampus’s horns and Krampus pleads with Santa not to kill him. It’s at this point that the Santa scene starts to break down before our eyes and everything finally begins to make sense. Remember the food drive? As it turns out, Santa was played by the radio station guy who had been put in charge of running the food drive. He was so done with Christmas and life that he had a psychotic break and went on a killing spree. The elves, and Mrs. Claus were just innocent bystanders. Fueled by this delerium, “Santa” attempts to finally end “Krampus” and takes a copious amount of lead to his chest. And that’s more or less where we end.
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