Posts Tagged ‘Christmas’
Monday, December 16th, 2024
When I was slasher searching on Tubi in October I was surprised how many wrestling-themed horror movies I was coming across. And now I went looking for Christmas horror on Shudder and the first one I watched turned out to have a pro wrestler character in it. I guess the whole world is wrestling now anyway. We can’t escape it. At least it’s fun in movies.
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT is a Canadian movie from 2023, and once I started watching it I understood why its plot description (“A lone man with the Christmas Spirit trapped in his head must kidnap a teenage girl on order to save Christmas”) was so vague. Its strength is that it’s odd and doesn’t really follow any of the usual formulas. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alexander Nunez, Bennet De Brabandere, Brad Austin, Chris Handfield, Christian Potenza, Christmas, Christmas horror, Enzo Campa, Jacklyn Francis, Jordan Kronis, Matia Jackett, Nicolas Grimes, Samantha Espie, Tavaree Daniel-Simms, Zion Forrest Lee
Posted in Reviews, Horror | 5 Comments »
Monday, December 9th, 2024
Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the holiday spirit, the cozy, crackling fire is back. ADULT SWIM YULE LOG 2: BRANCHIN’ OUT is a sequel to the brilliant 2022 Christmas surprise ADULT SWIM YULE LOG. If you’ve never heard of that, it was a yule log video that aired without explanation at midnight on Adult Swim, now viewable on [HBO] Max or on a special edition blu-ray from Dekanalog. As you watch the fire in the fireplace you start to hear conversations in the cozy cabin where it takes place, and someone comes to the door and there’s a murder. It becomes a found footage horror movie slowly zooming out to show more of the cabin and eventually changing format as the story turns increasingly absurd and surreal.
And now, in secret as far as I know, writer/director Casper Kelly (Too Many Cooks, the Cheddar Goblin commercial in MANDY) has made a continuation with a totally different, but still very impressive, Christmas/horror/comedy conceit. It centers on part 1 character Zoe (Andrea Laing, Step Up: High Water), revealed to have survived the massacre at the cabin (though her fiance did not). She wakes up in a hospital, haunted by hallucinations of the ultimate villain of the first film – the cursed yule log that flies around bashing people to death. Her failure to adjust to the trauma ends up costing her her job, so her fun gay friend Jakester (Chase Steven Anderson, “Ticket Booth Operator,” THE COLOR PURPLE [2023]) convinces her they should go to Cancun to get away from it all. But their car breaks down at the exit to a picturesque little town called Mistletoe, in time for “the festival.” You know – the annual yule log festival. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adult Swim, Andrea Laing, Casper Kelly, Chase Steven Anderson, Christmas, Jesse Malinowski, Jonathan Snipes, Michael Shenefelt, Sharon Blackwood, Susan Savoie
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Horror | 7 Comments »
Monday, December 2nd, 2024
NUTCRACKERS is a new David Gordon Green movie that went straight to Hulu. Since 2018 he’s directed four Blumhouse horror sequels (HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN KILLS, HALLOWEEN ENDS, THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER), at least three of them controversial/hated, plus 15 episodes of television. Personally I like his horror phase and wouldn’t mind if he kept going, but I’m also excited that he’s returned to standalone indie films.
Ben Stiller (NEXT OF KIN) stars as Michael Maxwell, an obnoxious Chicago real estate guy happy to tell you about the big deal he’s in the middle of or complain about the young guy Devon trying to steal it from him. Before he can get back to work he has to drive (in his yellow Porsche) to Wilmington, Ohio, he thinks to sign paperwork for his four nephews to be adopted after the death of his sister and her husband in a car accident. But as soon as he shows up the social worker (Linda Cardellini, CAPONE) tells him the foster family didn’t pass the background check so it’s on him to watch the kids until another one is found. Sorry dude. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Arlo Janson, Atlas Janson, ballet, Ben Stiller, Christmas, David Gordon Green, Edi Patterson, Homer Janson, Leland Douglas, Linda Cardellini, Toby Huss, Ulysses Janson
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs | 9 Comments »
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 »
