Bloody Christmas (DVD review).

Christmas is coming and the goose is going to get slaughtered, accompanied by quite a few others in this not so cheery movie where the main star is a guy wandering about in a Santa Claus outfit. Be warned, you won’t find great quality of acting, production, sound and anything else you might expect from a good movie because it’s rather below what one would expect. However, if you can overcome these limitations, there is actually a story here. Not a good one, but a story nonetheless!

You will have to sit through 90 minutes of moderate torture. Produced and directed by Michael Shershenovich, it doesn’t seem to have much of a budget but it shows you what can be achieved with a little effort. The main character Rich is fat and middle-aged. Three decades before, he was an action movie star, so we were led to believe, but now, down on his luck, he works as Santa Claus in a cheap money-grabbing video production. Santa is rather disconsolate with the whole affair and isn’t putting his heart into the acting, so much so that he fantasises about shooting everyone on the set.

Things go from bad to worse when Santa gets sacked, his cheque can’t be cashed, his car won’t start and he is locked out of his house. It doesn’t get any better when he mistakenly insults a friend thinking she is a junkie when in fact the syringe is for diabetic insulin injections. Meanwhile, a priest in a church is having a bad time trying to placate parishioners while all along the bad world continues unabated. Even more meanwhile, rather amateurish hunters discover a mutilated body in the woods and it’s not long before lacklustre cops are on the scene trying to figure things out. Not exactly ‘Starsky And Hutch’, they plod along trying to solve murders. There is also a suicidal woman, traumatised by the death of her son.

All the characters come together in a way which is sort of predictable but it’s funny in a macabre manner and there are many worse movies on the market. The initial blurb about the movie is rather misleading. We are possibly led to believe that Santa is a bad guy and we keep waiting for him to go berserk. Is he the murderer? Maybe it’s the priest or one of the cops. You will have to watch the movie to find out. There isn’t much to recommend here but it’s okay and if you like a couple of gruesome murders chucked in, then this is for you.

Rod MacDonald

November 2012

 

(region one DVD: pub: Planetworks/MVD Group B008GAXUDA. 1 DVD 90 minute film. Price: $14.95)

cast: Robert Arenson, Steve Montague and Robert Youngren

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