Category: Movie Reviews

After killer Santas, killer guys dressed like Santa, killer aliens fought by Santa, and all things in between, we have the final boss of Christmas horror weirdness, the hands down dumbest Christmas monster I have ever witnessed, a killer Christmas tree. An early work from the acclaimed director of Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey, The Killing Tree confronts the viewers with an idea so insane that it demands viewing, if only just so you can confirm it is real. I’ve confirmed it’s real, so now let me lay this all out for you.

I stayed away as long as I could from Christmas Alien movies, I really did. Can you actually blame me, though? There are so many movies about killers in Santa suits, killer Santas, and killers who just happen to be murdering people around Christmastime that I just needed something weirder and more out there to satisfy my ever deepening perverse desires. You don’t get much further out there than Feeder 2: Slay Bells, a Christmas themed sequel to a $500 budget shot on video alien attack movie from the mid 90s,and it’s almost always bad when a description of a movie feels like a Madlib. And before you ask, no, it does not matter at all if you haven’t seen the first Feeders, there really isn’t any continuity you have to be concerned about.

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.