Category: Movie Reviews

Time for a completely normal Christmas fairy tale about talking animals, wizards, sleeping powder, and the need for a comprehensive mental health care system. Also, without any context it looks like that mouse is about to play a very mean joke on Santa when he’s just trying to catch some shuteye.

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 13^th 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.