Santa Claus is Mental

Despite it being a time for togetherness and holiday cheer, Christmas is also a season ripe for holiday horror. We’ve covered one such famous movie before, Black Christmas, the film that helped start the slasher movie genre while also spawning a bunch of holiday-themed horror movies, and plenty more came along after. It’s an interesting way to build horror, to offset those feelings of good cheer with bad blood, horror, and gore. A good film, like Black Christmas, can bring all those elements together. A bad film, though, clearly shows just how hard it is to make a holiday horror film that works.

I won’t deny, I watched Christmas Evil mostly for the name. I’d already watched a different (unrelated) film with a similar punny name, New Year’s Evil, and I figured there had to be some fun to be had from taking another holiday and adding “evil” to the title. The worst that happens is you get a mediocre movie with a few kills in it. But watching Christmas Evil I realized there’s something even worse: a boring holiday movie with almost no kills. While some holiday horror films have lasted, getting mentioned time and again when the season rolls around, it’s pretty obvious why Christmas Evil has fallen into obscurity: it’s just not that good.

Christmas Evil (also known as You Better Watch Out and Terror in Toyland) opens in 1947. That’s when two little brothers, Harry (Gus Salud) and Philip (Wally Moran) Stadling, get to see Santa come down the chimney to put out their presents. The boys watch with rapt attention, but afterwards Philip comments that Santa was really just their dad. Harry, though, believes, wishing Santa were real. He sneaks downstairs later, back to the tree, but that’s when he sees his mother and “Santa” making out beside the tree. It totally warps the little boy.

Thirty-three years later, Harry (now played by Brandon Maggart) has grown up with a deep, almost disturbing, love for Christmas. His whole apartment is decorated in Christmas themeing all year round. He works at a toy factory, making toys for good little girls and boys. And, just to make it weirder, he also keeps track of what all the little boys and girls in the neighborhood are up to, keeping track of their activities in his nice and naughty books. Harry really believes in Christmas, and he decides that if Santa isn’t going to come this year, he’ll just have to become Santa so he can do it himself. But the rest of the town better watch out because this Santa is off his rocker, and if he gets pushed he might just take matters into his own hands… his very deadly hands.

In concept I like what Christmas Evil could have been. A guy, very obviously deeply disturbed, going around as Santa and causing chaos and carnage all Christmas night is a pretty solid idea. You can juxtapose the good he thinks he’s doing against the very evil incidents he actually causes, and the combination could lead to a really trippy, pretty gory experience. There’s a lot of promise in the concept of Christmas Evil, none of which actually comes across in the final film.

The first issue is that Christmas Evil takes a very long time to actually get towards anything approaching horror. We spend almost an hour with Harry, seeing him go about his life. Yes, seeing his Christmas themed apartment is a touch off-putting, and watching him track the kids in the neighborhood is very disturbing, but the time spent with him goes on and on without much in the way of direction or reason. We don’t need to watch him have interpersonal conflicts with people at work, not only because his job is barely fleshed out but also because none of the people that he fights with are all that interesting. It’s a distraction from what we’re waiting for: him being an evil Santa that kills.

There’s also a subplot with his brother (played as an adult by Jeffrey DeMunn) that really doesn’t go anywhere. An early scene between Harry and Philip on the phone shows that Philip is worried about his brother… but then nothing happens. There’s a small scene later with a confrontation, but by that point all the evil (such as it is) has already happened and the whole storyline with the brother feels disconnected from everything else. It’s the kind of storyline that could be excised from the film and it wouldn’t really affect anything at all.

Effectively the first hour of the film is padding, through and through. You could cut out much of the material – the time with his brother, the time at the toy factory, and hell, even the section with them as kids which also barely has any bearing on the function of the film – and it wouldn’t affect the overall storyline at all. It would make the film shorter, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, and it would have provided far more time for actual evil. You know, like is in the title.

As far as Harry being a bad Santa, we only really get two sequences, and three kills, to back that up. We’re promised a slasher killing Santa but what we really get is a bumbling idiot that has no plan, has no modus operandi, and barely is able to kill people before the town turns against him and chases him to his death (spoilers for a 45 year old movie). A film like this lives and dies on its horror, especially since it doesn’t have much else going on, and Christmas Evil can’t even really provide much horror.

We need kills, more of them and with more creativity. Harry stabs a couple of people, and then later tries to smother a third before stabbing him, too. He drives around town in a van painted up like Santa’s sleigh, which is amusing, but we should see him do more with it. Naughty kids should get run over. Bad corporate execs should be stalked in the homes. People should get presents that explode, milk and cookies should be poisoned. There are so many ways you can take the mythology built up around Santa that could then be twisted so Harry could be an effective, and scary, killer, but none of that happens here. Harry doesn’t have what it takes.

Christmas Evil isn’t a scary move, it’s a sad one. It’s like the writers tried to create a character study of a sad, depressed, lonely man that turns to Christmas as his salvation, except they also decided to make it a horror movie as well. One side is a pretty good drama, the other is a pretty good horror film, but when you mash them together the way Christmas Evil does, you get neither. You don’t care about Harry and you’re bored by his “evil” antics. It’s not fun, scary, or interesting at all.

In short, Christmas Evil is a failure of a film. It doesn’t work as a character study or as a horror film. It’s tedious, uninteresting, and lacking in thrills or chills. There’s potential in the concept of a mad man pretending to be Santa, but whatever horror could be derived from that is entirely missing from this film. Christmas Evil has potential, but it completely falls apart in execution.