CHRISTMAS EVIL
Not bad for its type

  I have a thing against Santa-as-slasher horror movies, which I've said who knows how many times before.  There are lots of movies which have Santa wannabes as the slasher, but just once I want to see one where Santa flies right in from the North Pole and gives those naughty kids something nastier than a lump of coal.  With Christmas Evil, I was expecting another schlocky slash-fest like, say, Silent Night, Deadly Night.  This one's a little more thoughtful, if not quite as fun.

Brandon Maggart stars as Harry, who when he was a kid, caught his mom getting a little bit more than a treat in her stocking from Santa.  Given that this is a horror movie, you know this'll scar him for life.  So when he's all grown, he works at a toy factory, and his apartment is like a Santa Claus theme park, where he sings and dances to insipid recordings of insipid carols all the time.  He's also spying on the neighborhood kids and keeping track of their naughty/nice quotient.  But when he finds his company exercising somewhat less than an ideal amount of Christmas spirit (they're asking employees to donate both labor AND money to a toys-for-the-children charity, while not actually donating any company profits), he takes action.  He steals a big hoard of toys from the factory, paints a red sleigh on his van, dons a Santa suit and distributes toys to the kids himself.  As for the uncharitable adults (including a co-worker who conned him into taking an extra shift), well, Santa's got other plans.

The story is kind of slow (and dumb in parts, like how one man is smothered to death in his bed next to his wife, who must be a very heavy sleeper), but it's involving; our hero may be insane, but he's sympathetically insane.  Additionally, the absurdity of the situations created by a serial-killing Santa aren't often played for laughs (notable exception: the all-Santa police lineup), as you'd think they'd have to be.  A TV reporter saying "If you spot anyone dressed like Santa..." is funny, but he's deadly serious!

I'm not sure, however, how serious the last shot of the film is supposed to be; fantasy, metaphor, whathaveya, it still feels way out of place.  And I'm not clear at all on what it was Harry gave to the mother of the naughty kid who wanted a subscription to Penthouse.

But I loved the movie's seedy, grainy, very much circa-1980 look and feel, something which I don't see ever making a comeback in tomorrow's films.  And there's a great scene at the end where a group of children make their choice between their parents - people shown throughout the film as always disciplining or scolding their kids - and Santa, and their choice shouldn't surprise anybody.

No, this isn't enough of a recommendation to get into the green zone on my webpage - it's still mostly mindless, without chills, and all in all pretty tame considering the controversy that erupted in its wake.  But it's a whole lot better than I'd expected it to be.  Written and directed by Lewis Jackson, this movie is also known as Terror In Toyland, and You Better Watch Out.  Watch for Jeffrey DeMunn as Harry's brother.

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