Posts Tagged ‘Christmas’
Thursday, December 21st, 2023
In the interest of jolliness, as well as continuing the Stream Warriors (formerly Slasher Search) project of scouring for unknown slasher gems, I spent last night searching for watchable holiday horror obscurities on Tubi.
For my tastes this can be rough going. There’s a whole cottage industry of boring, off-brand Krampus movies and shit, but that’s not even the biggest threat. Their library is also a bottomless well of no budget, non-professional movies of the current digital video era, and so far in my experience not many of those have the same appeal as the regional horror movies shot on film in the ‘80s with hopes of a drive-in or VHS release.
Film had a magical power not just because of how it looked, but because of the difficulty of acquiring and properly using it. If a movie was made by some weird dude and his friends from work but he was able to pass the test of shooting it on 8mm or whatever, then that was a weird dude and his friends from work worth respecting. They were true dreamers, if not artists then at least romantics reaching from something outside of their small town, day job existence. So even their worst movies might be interesting, maybe even fascinating. I don’t think that’s the case with many of these. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Annette Wozniak, Beatrice Fletcher, Becca Hirani, Brent Baird, Christmas, Christmas horror, Julie Stevens, May Kelly, Mike McMurran, Patrick Bergin, Stephen Staley, Stream Warriors
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, December 20th, 2023
RIOT (1996) is a Gary Daniels movie from director Joseph Merhi (L.A. CRACKDOWN, L.A. HEAT, L.A. VICE) that I decided to watch now because I heard it takes place on Christmas Eve. Daniels (between HAWK’S VENGEANCE and POCKET NINJAS) stars as Major Shane Alcott, an S.A.S. guy who brings his many karate tournament trophies with him to America, where he’s working with his friend Major Williams (Sugar Ray Leonard in his feature film acting debut) to train American soldiers.
This year Santa brought us a riot. A few Black protesters chant “No justice, no peace” as a crowd of white guys in flannel shirts and backwards baseball hats run around smashing cars and windows with bats and setting cop cars on fire. This comes from Canada’s b-action factory PM Entertainment, so it’s quite a stuntfest on a soundstage city block decked in Christmas lights. Merhi cuts that together with what I believe is real footage of various fires during the LA riots, accompanied by a laid back, saxophone heavy “O, Come, All Ye Faithful” by Teresa Tudury. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anastasia Sakelaris, Charles Napier, Christmas, Christmas action, Dex Elliott Sanders, Gary Daniels, Joseph John Barmettler, Joseph Merhi, Kenneth Tigar, Mongo Brownlee, Paige Rowland, PM Entertainment, Ron Barker, Sugar Ray Leonard, William Applegate Jr.
Posted in Reviews, Action | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, December 5th, 2023
I don’t need to tell any of you that one of the all time great directors, John Woo, has returned to our screens. If you didn’t read it or hear it, you could probly sense it. It’s been six years since his last movie (MANHUNT, 2017) and twenty since his last American movie (PAYCHECK, 2003), so it’s an event. It’s also a Christmas-set action movie, which I always appreciate, and it has a gimmicky storytelling conceit (no dialogue) that makes it a fun formal challenge for the grandmaster.
It is not, however, a poetic story of brotherhood like A BETTER TOMORROW, BULLET IN THE HEAD or THE KILLER, nor an American genre pushed to gorgeous levels of absurdity like HARD TARGET, BLACKJACK or FACE/OFF. Instead it’s a skilled and slightly eccentric but not emotionally complex take on a standard vigilante revenge formula. And there’s another catch, which I will get to soon. We’ll just say it’s more of an interesting film that I’m excited to write about than a great John Woo film. But I got some entertainment from it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Angeles Woo, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Christmas, Christmas action, Harold Torres, Jeremy Marinas, Joel Kinnaman, John Woo, Marco Beltrami, no dialogue, Robert Archer Lynn, Scott Mescudi, Yoko Hamamura
Posted in Reviews, Action | 38 Comments »
Thursday, June 8th, 2023
June 8, 1983
To many, TRADING PLACES is a beloved comedy classic. To me it’s a movie that Mrs. Vern references often and that we occasionally flip past on TNT. I think the only time I saw it all the way through I was still in elementary school. So I came to this viewing pretty fresh.
I know it goes back to The Prince and the Pauper or some shit, but Hollywood particularly loved this kind of comedy concept in the ’80s through ’90s: What if a non-rich guy could live among the rich? And what if a rich guy could live among the non-rich? What laughs would we have? What lessons would we learn? Don’t you agree it would be valuable? This one’s writers, Timothy Harris & Herschel Weingrod, later gave us BREWSTER’S MILLIONS, and you could also count THE TOY, LIFE STINKS, KING RALPH, and I’m sure some others. This is John Landis’s version, and he kicks it off with some satirical bite, but it eventually eases up and acts like we’re supposed to like the rich guy, assumes we want to see him have a happy ending. As was the style in those days. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christmas, Dan Aykroyd, Denholm Elliott, Don Ameche, Eddie Murphy, Giancarlo Esposito, Herschel Weingrod, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jim Belushi, John Landis, Paul Gleason, Ralph Bellamy, Timothy Harris
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 25 Comments »
Friday, December 23rd, 2022
I don’t usually post on Fridays, but here is my second one today, because I got two last stocking stuffers for you before the holiday weekend. Here are reviews of two Christmas related shorts, one horror, one crime (sorta). Pretty obscure ones, but both worth checking out.
First up is THE PRESENT, which is a 2005 episode of a Japanese anthology show called Kazuo Umezz’s Horror Theater (released on DVD as part of Horror Theater 3). The titular Kazuo Umezu (the spelling varies) is a famous author of horror manga, as you can guess by the art laid over the introduction to the show, so this is an adaptation of one of his stories. He’s been around long enough that the 1968 movie THE SNAKE GIRL AND THE SILVER-HAIRED WITCH is based on his comics too.
THE PRESENT filters the classic American form of the killer Santa movie through a more Japanese (and specifically manga) style of fucked-upness. It’s about a little girl named Yuko (Kiyo Ôshiro) who wakes up on Christmas Eve, terrified by a nightmare about Santa. She has a Christmas tree in her room and a stocking on her bedpost – I’m not sure if that’s how they do it in Japan, or if it’s weird. But her parents comfort her and tell her to go back to sleep and she’ll get presents because she’s a good girl (though “if you do bad things he’ll come and get you.”) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christmas, Christmas crime, Christmas horror, Francis Ford Coppola, killer Santa, manga, William S. Burroughs, Yudai Yamaguchi
Posted in Reviews, Cartoons and Shit, Crime, Horror | 12 Comments »
Friday, December 23rd, 2022
TOYS OF TERROR is a 2020 Christmas horror movie that’s exactly what it sounds like – a movie about toys coming to life and doing evil toy shit. It seems to have premiered on SyFy, and it’s on DVD and VOD. The director is someone named Nicholas Verso (BOYS IN THE TREES) and it’s written and executive produced by Dana Gould, the comedian, Simpsons writer and podcaster. I had no idea when I rented it that anyone notable was involved, and I respect that Gould seems to have just wanted to make a straightforward, non-parody Full Moon type movie. But it comes from the dystopically named “Blue Ribbon Content” division of Warner Bros. Television, responsible for some DC Comics web animation plus the DTV movies DAPHNE & VELMA and THE BANANA SPLITS MOVIE, and has better craft and production value than many of the actual Full Moon movies, especially the later ones.
It’s the story of a family coming to stay at a former children’s home that they plan to refurbish into a mansion and flip. (Same set up as The Haunting of Hill House.) It’s implied to be somewhere in Washington state, but it’s filmed in Canada – as usual, and as indicated by a cast full of actors you know are Canadian because of how many Hallmark Christmas movies they’re in. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christmas, Christmas horror, Dana Gould, Dayo Ade, killer dolls, Kyana Teresa, Nicholas Verso, stop motion animation, Verity Marks
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 2 Comments »
Thursday, December 22nd, 2022
I really enjoyed Rob Zombie’s love letter to THE MUNSTERS earlier this year, and it even got me to check out the o.g. Munsters movie MUNSTER GO HOME!. But Zombie’s movie did not go over well with or cause much of a splash among the general public, and now there’s this Netflix show Wednesday, based on Munsters rival The Addams Family, which is actually a huge streaming hit (and which I have to admit I like even more than THE MUNSTERS). So it kinda looks like a Photon Warrior to Lazer Tag situation for ol’ Herman and Lily. Or Gobots to Transformers. Or IRON EAGLE to TOP GUN.
Still, I am making this The Year of the Munsters by watching a Munsters Christmas special as part of my holiday festivities. THE MUNSTERS’ SCARY LITTLE CHRISTMAS (not to be confused with the weird New Zealand Christmas special THE MONSTER’S CHRISTMAS) is a 1996 Fox TV movie. The Munsters are entirely recast from the 1995 Fox movie HERE COME THE MUNSTERS, but they carried over an uptight neighbor character named Edna Dimwitty, played by Mary Woronov (DEATH RACE 2000), so I guess they’re connected. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ann Magnuson, Arturo Gil, Bruce Spence, Bug Hall, Christmas, Ed Gale, Elaine Hendrix, Mark Mitchell, Mary Woronov, Sam McMurray, Sandy Baron, TV movies
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Monster | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, December 21st, 2022
Whether Christmas is a religious holiday for us, or just a way to celebrate giving, or whatever, we can all agree that it’s mainly about trying to find more movies we haven’t seen that are about a killer Santa or some shit. That’s the true and sole meaning of Christmas, is what it says quite clearly in the Bible, and if you don’t believe me I challenge you to tell me which verses it’s not in. You can’t do it, can you? Case closed. Anyway the point is this year I saw CHRISTMAS BLOODY CHRISTMAS but for those of you who would prefer to have the same title but shorter there’s also CHRISTMAS BLOOD (Juelblod), a Norwegian one from 2017.
IMDb lists it as a horror comedy. It really doesn’t read as one to me, but maybe it’s an exceedingly dry sense of humor – there is certainly some absurdity to it, which is what I liked about it. It’s very openly a Santa Claus version of HALLOWEEN. It opens in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, 2011, when a little girl and her parents get killed by a guy dressed as Santa. The police show up in time to shoot the Santa, and Detective Thomas Rasch (Stig Henrik Hoff, THE THING premaquel), who’s been chasing this guy for 13 years, unloads his gun into him while he’s down. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ben Rock, Bonita Friedericy, Christmas, Christmas horror, Daniel Myrick, David Simkins, killer Santa, Philip Newby, Raw Feed, Reinert Kiil, slashers, Sondre Krogtoft, Stig Henrik Hoff
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, December 20th, 2022
CHRISTMAS BLOODY CHRISTMAS is the new one from writer/director Joe Begos. I previously reviewed his first two features, ALMOST HUMAN (2013) and THE MIND’S EYE (2015), but I’ve been sleeping on his 2019 double whammy of BLISS and VFW. Nevertheless I had to see his new one as soon as it hit Shudder because it’s Christmas horror. There’s a timeliness factor.
It’s a low budget movie but seems huge and lush compared to those other two I mentioned. It continues in the same tradition of filtering a specific ‘80s horror aesthetic through Begos’ brain, now with more dialogue and humor. But I wouldn’t call it a comedy. After the comical advertisements that open the movie and introduce the absurd horror premise, there aren’t really jokes. The laughs come from the characters themselves being funny. Otherwise it comes across as very serious – an odd choice that I like. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christmas, Christmas horror, Dora Madison, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Joe Begos, Jonah Ray, Josh Ethier, killer Santa, Riley Dandy, robot, Sam Delich
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 11 Comments »
Monday, December 19th, 2022
I do believe this is my first review where just telling you the movie exists is kind of a spoiler. But I had to have it spoiled to know to watch it myself, so now I’m passing that information on to you. This is a horror movie that was designed to be found on accident, originally promoted like this: “ADULT SWIM YULE LOG: Get in the holiday spirit with this cozy, crackling fire,” and airing at 11:30 pm after the season finale of Rick & Morty. Now it can be found on Home Box Office Maximum under “Adult Swim Yule Log – a.k.a. The Fireplace.”
It starts off as a normal Yule Log or fireplace video. Just footage of a fire with some Christmas music playing. But after a few minutes of that we start to hear something going on outside of the frame. The owner of the cabin containing the cozy, crackling fire is talking about getting the place cleaned We see her walk past the fireplace a few times. Then there’s a knock on the door, a woman (Tordy Clark, GLORIOUS) talking about her car breaking down, and introducing her son… a hulking, grunting Leatherface type (Brendan Patrick Connor, JOKER) wearing a plastic Halloween mask of a Ken-doll type character. He bursts in and attacks as his mom reminds him to “Say nice things to her, women like that.” It’s off camera, but we get the implication, and this is a really fucked up thing to have on as holiday background ambience. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adult Swim, Andrea Laing, Casper Kelly, Christmas, found footage, Jonathon Pawlowski, Justin Miles, long takes, Mark Costello, Tordy Clark
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 9 Comments »
