Category: Christmas Clusterfork

Aliens First Christmas

When it comes to series of reviews like the Christmas Countdown, sometimes you plan out a theme and sometimes that theme organically emerges. Friday the 13th was such a special day I thought it deserved a scary Christmas horror marathon, but this alien thing kind of took me by surprise. I didn’t think there were going to be aliens in The Yummy Gummy Search For Santa, but here we are, and now I have the opportunity to continue this with a look at a bizarre little Christmas special from 1991, Aliens First Christmas. I don’t know who made this, I don’t know why, all I know is that for some reason this exists, so let’s talk about it.

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The Yummy Gummy Search For Santa

So do you all remember that weird electronic song from about twenty years ago about the singing and dancing gummy bear? No? Shit, this is going to be a lot harder to explain, then. In the mid 2000s, a German composer released a song in Hungary that became a pop culture phenomenon, lasting months on the charts and subsequently getting over 3 billion views on YouTube. Why does any of this matter? Aside from proving that “brain rot” isn’t a new thing, it matters because that gummy bear was a brief pop culture icon, and all pop culture icons deserve a terrible Christmas special, so please join me for Gummy Bear’s first (and thankfully only) movie, Gummibär: The Yummy Gummy Search for Santa.

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Alien X-Mas

New Christmas specials come out every year, and sometimes these are just filler, but other times they’re strongly pushed by whatever work, app, or streaming service that they belong too. Alien X-Mas is an example of the latter, a special I’ve been curious about since I first saw it on the Netflix home page, because, well, just look at it! That’s an odd poster up there and I knew that I had to check this out to see just what I had been scrolling by all this time. After finally watching it I can confirm that Alien X-Mas is not what I was expecting, but let’s back up and start at the beginning.

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Santa Isn’t Real

Following a brutal attack on Christmas Eve, Natalie finds herself waking up from a coma nearly a year later, just in time for the holiday season to restart. She isn’t just dealing with physical wounds, but also the trauma that no one believes her attacker was Santa Claus – worse still, they believe her injuries self inflicted. When she and her friends head up to a secluded snowy cabin, Natalie struggles to return to a changed world, which gets even tougher when a Holly jolly killer comes around.

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Santa’s Slay

With how many professional wrestlers have successfully entered the acting world, like Dave Bautista and John Cena, you can sometimes forget how many of them have dipped their toes into the pond, so to speak. It was only a matter of time that one of them would stumble into a horror movie, and we all lucked out because that led us to Bill Goldberg in Santa’s Slay as none other than Santa himself, only this time, Santa’s the one who is being naughty. The plot here is pretty simple, turns out that Santa only delivered presents because he lost a bet hundreds of years ago, and now that his time is done, he can go back to his favorite thing; murder! While Santa is busy murdering everyone in extremely over the top ways, a teenage boy whose family knows about the secretly murderous ways of Santa has to team up with his high school crush to try and stop Santa and save Christmas.

While Santa’s Slay isn’t a masterpiece, it does a lot of things right that earn it a spot at the cult classic annual watchlist. As you can probably tell from the summary, this is not a movie interested in taking itself too seriously, and even when the kills are gory, it tends to be more in an absurd over the top way than in a strictly horrific way. I still wouldn’t watch this with someone squeamish, but it’s easy for people with a twisted sense of humor to get a lot of laughs out of this, especially when you take into account how much Goldberg chews the scenery and goes all in on this absurd premise. With such a fun premise and the recent success of violent Christmas movies like Terrifier 3 and Violent Night, we’re overdue for a Santa’s Slay remake or legacy sequel. Goldberg could probably still pull it off.

Slayed and Friday the 13th: Never Hike in the Snow

Christmas and horror have been linked together for longer than movies have existed, looking at you A Christmas Carol and all your ghosts and ghouls, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise that someone would make a killer Santa movie. What is surprising is how damn many of these things there are! From Silent Night Deadly Night which just has a guy in a Santa suit killing people to the recent Violent Night which has actual Santa Claus delivering a yuletide smackdown on some fools, we seem fascinated by this idea of a Santa Claus, or someone dressed like him, killing people. In that spirit, for the next couple of days I’ll focus on killer Santa movies, starting with a low budget indie slasher, Slayed.

In 2014, a Santa dressed man murders two women in a water treatment plant, ruining Christmastime for a small town for a long time after. 5 years later, a substitute security guard fills in on Christmas Eve at that same plant, meeting a team already on edge and expecting something dangerous. When strange things begin happening at the plant, the security guard and a paranoid technician get caught in another night of murder and mayhem.

Slayed could have easily fallen into the same pitfalls that a lot of low budget slashers do, but surprisingly manages to avoid going down those paths. Though there are moments that cater to the sleazy exploitation crowd, particularly the opening, Slayed is mostly a twisty cat and mouse type thriller about a murderer and a man who’s been waiting for years to finally get revenge on said murderer. While the movie is restrained by its low budget, its writing and acting, particularly later in the film, elevate what could be another tiresome slasher and make it something beyond a low budget splatterfest. There is also one of the funniest and most prescient sequences I’ve ever seen at the end of the film, which I have linked to below. Just watch 5 seconds and you’ll understand. And if you get curious and want to watch the rest of the movie, you can follow that link to YouTube and watch the whole thing for free.

Friday the 13th: Never Hike In the Snow

Bonus round! While there hasn’t been an official Friday the 13th set around Christmas, or even in any snowy setting, there has been an impressive fan film by the name of Never Hike in the Snow. Even though Friday the 13th hasn’t had a new movie since 2009, passionate fans have been making their own movies, shorts mostly, and the best of these rise up to, and in some cases beyond, the heights that the original films managed. I really appreciate the creativity and passion behind fan films, and the ‘Never Hike’ series of Friday the 13th fan films from Womp Stomp Films have been a great example of that. Besides snagging some of the actors from the Friday the 13th series, Womp Stomp manages to recreate the atmosphere, tension, and intensity that makes these feel like shortened versions of the actual movies. I’ve linked the Youtube video down below, and if you liked it you should check out their other fan films, they’re all a good time.

elf Pets Santa’s Reindeer Rescue

As the years go on, I realize more and more how I am no longer a hip youth, but an old and world-weary man, case in point being Elf on the Shelf, a holiday “tradition” that I had no knowledge of until it swarmed social media in the 2010s. I never paid much attention to it because I was way beyond being a child then and I don’t have children, so for me this was just a strange fad that I didn’t get. Unbeknownst to me, there was a media empire growing just out of my view, an expanded universe for the Elves on the Shelves where we learn all about the other creatures inhabiting the Elf on the Shelf world. Creatures you can, of course, buy.

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We Wish You A Turtle Christmas

In anticipation Christmas in two weeks, it’s officially time for the Christmas Countdown, a daily posting of a brief review of a strange Christmas movie, short, cartoon, whatever, that deserves a bit of attention. Today we’ll start off with a pop culture relic that will leave you with many more questions than answers, We Wish You A Turtle Christmas! In case it wasn’t clear, this is a live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Christmas Special from waaaaaay back in 1993. There’s not a lot here, considering this is only a 22 minute special, but there are a couple Christmas carols with a ‘unique’ spin on their lyrics. For reasons unknown to me, people kept trying to jam songs into the TMNT, like with the Coming Out of Our Shells live theatrical production, which I swear is real and not a fever dream I had. I blame Vanilla Ice and that catchy Go Ninja Go song.

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Winslow The Christmas Bear and 3 Bears’ Christmas

Winslow The Christmas Bear

Written & Directed by Craig Clyde

Today we’re having a Bear-y Merry Christmassy double feature of supposedly family-friendly Christmas films, both of which happen to feature bears. Winslow The Christmas Bear is the timeless story of a bear, named Winslow, who wants to learn what Christmas is all about. This is a story within a story as a magic book that appears to a young girl while she is asleep, and this book contains the story of Winslow. Anyway, Winslow learns about Christmas by going around the forest he lives in and asking the other woodland creatures if they know what Christmas is all about. Winslow meets a raccoon, an otter, a fox, a fisher, a skunk, and many other animals, in a series of sequences that are not the least bit repetitive or pointless! If Winslow the Christmas Bear were animated or made using puppets it would be not even worth talking about, but it isn’t. This short film was made using live trained animals, and they are not having any of this.

The first few encounters are okay, Winslow meets with a raccoon and otter and they are okay with the presence of this massive Christmas-loving predator, presumably because they’re being bribed with massive amounts of treats, but as soon as he meets the fox, problems start. This fox does not want to be anywhere near Winslow and is constantly running out of frame because it just wants to, understandably, not be anywhere near him. Seeing that was kind of amusing at first but then things get much worse. None of the other animals want to be anywhere near Winslow, and though I am no animal behavior expert, they are visibly anxious, agitated, and defensive. When Winslow meets the wacky skunk, it is clearly petrified, tail up, and frozen in fear. When Winslow is forced up a tree to interact with a lynx, it is clearly stressed, ears pressed back, hissing and swatting at this bear who just wants to know the true meaning of Christmas. The ending is particularly misguided, wherein Winslow the bear arrives at the young girl’s house and she hand feeds him treats. I don’t care how much training that bear has, there is no way I’d ever feel safe with that. And I’d get this if it were made in the 60s or 70s, but this is from 1996! I can only imagine what would happen if this were released today.

3 Bears’ Christmas

Written & Directed by William Butler

Look at that poster. Look at it! Gaze upon it and let it seep into your unfortunate brain! However scary it looks on a poster, I will most definitely say that it is much much scarier in motion. The way the masks hang on their faces reminds me of Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and that would be great if this was meant to be scary. It’s a little less good for a heartwarming family comedy. Now that the horror elements are established, I’ll talk about the plot of this fine film is. When a woodsman chops down Mother Nature’s favorite tree, she kidnaps the woodsman’s wife, stops all snowfall (so we could film this movie in May), and grants all animals in the forest humanoid forms so that they can fight against humanity. About 10 years later, a young bear ventures off into the woods with his beaver friend to find the perfect Christmas gift for his parents. After accidentally taking a turnip that belonged to the Boo Hag, a witch who lives in the woods, the bear is turned into a human and must find the perfect gift for his parents or he will be forced to stay that way forever! Also, while out in the woods they run into the woodsman’s daughter, who wandered into the woods to see what her animal neighbors do on Christmas.

As far as the story goes, 3 Bears’ Christmas is totally fine. It’s a fairy tale type thing and that matches up with the whole aesthetic they’re going for. The most interesting thing here is something I’ve already talked about, the costumes/prosthetics, and even though I’m sure they spent a lot of time and effort setting those up, the downright creepy nature of most of the costumes is so distracting. One, and only one, animal person has her face painted to look like an animal without any other prosthetics and she looked perfectly convincing as a fantastical anthropomorphic fox. Unfortunately, this fox was a “gypsy junk seller” who enchants a small child, persuades the group to exchange all their goods for a useless trinket, and then leaves the movie unscathed. I don’t think I need to explain why the “gypsy con artist” is not an appropriate thing to feature in this family feature. Any snake oil salesman or flim-flammer could have been used, why even go there? Aside from that, this is pretty harmless, but I don’t think I would recommend either of these movies as good bad films. They’re curiosities at best and if that is what you’re looking for, two bizarre Christmas specials, then look no further!