We’re mostly agreed these days that BAD SANTA is a timeless Christmas classic, right? I have friends and loved ones who it’s too mean for, and it got brutal critical reception at the time, done no favors by Miramax insisting on more ball punching and shit so the theatrical and “BADDER SANTA” cuts could fit some lowbrow comedy marketing strategy that must’ve worked for them on SCARY MOVIE or something. The superior director’s cut has been available for years now, and now I watch that and mourn the loss of one dumb joke from the theatrical ending:
But in any of its incarnations, BAD SANTA makes me laugh so much and channels so much of my most negative thoughts that it’s one of the few movies I can watch once a year without getting tired of it. Willie (Billy Bob Thornton, THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE) is a funny asshole for the ages, a burnt out piece of shit full of self-loathing and even more full of loathing-others. His caustic wit and self-destructive behavior died for our sins, transforming humanity’s worst tendencies into wise ass Yuletide fuck yous both deserved and undeserved, but in a forum where no one can be hurt. He uses his asshole powers for good in his dealings with treacherous Marcus (who can dish it out too) or Bernie Mac’s quietly scheming “store dick.”
After so many viewings I sometimes find myself teary-eyed at Willie’s realization that Thurman (Brett Kelly, TRICK ‘R TREAT) cut himself while carving his weird Christmas gift, and at his attempt to return the favor before being gunned down by police. The smallness of the gesture to me makes it more authentic and in turn puts this jerk in line with more severe holiday transformations like Scrooge‘s or The Grinch’s. (read the rest of this shit…)
PUPPET MASTER VS. DEMONIC TOYS came out the year after FREDDY VS. JASON and a few months before ALIEN VS. PREDATOR, but eight years before THE AVENGERS, so it is an important milestone in cinematic universe crossover events. According to Wikipedia, though, it is “non-canon.” Produced for The Sci-Fi Network (before they had their own proprietary spelling), it doesn’t have Charles Band or Full Moon’s names anywhere on it, but it was directed by Ted Nicolaou (THE DUNGEONMASTER, TERRORVISION, SUBSPECIES, BAD CHANNELS, DRAGONWORLD) and written by C. Courtney Joyner (PUPPET MASTER III, DOCTOR MORDRID, TRANCERS III, plus PRISON and CLASS OF 1999).
Although I’m not all that familiar with either the vast PUPPET MASTER saga or the rich DEMONIC TOYS mythos I did think this one might be worth watching this week when I read (in Yuletide Terror, once again) that it was a Christmas movie.
Corey Feldman (EDGE OF HONOR, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES) plays Robert Toulon, proprietor of Toulon’s Puppet Hospital, which looks like a business on the outside but from inside seems to just be a basement where he and his daughter Alex (Danielle Keaton, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, PINOCCHIO’S REVENGE, BABY GENIUSES) do experiments mixing chemicals and blood in beakers and injecting them into the famous PUPPET MASTER puppets Blade, Pinhead, Jester and Six Shooter (but not Leech Woman). Although I guess they’re on their own alternate dimension timeline, please note that these are the original Greatest Generation anti-Nazi puppets, not the hate criminals from the S. Craig Zahler version. (read the rest of this shit…)
Do you remember the syndicated TV show Monsters that ran in the late ’80s? I don’t really either, but I do remember seeing commercials for it. It was a horror anthology series produced by Richard P. Rubinstein, the guy who co-founded Laurel Entertainment with George Romero and produced MARTIN, DAWN OF THE DEAD, KNIGHTRIDERS, CREEPSHOW and DAY OF THE DEAD. They also produced Tales From the Darkside together, and this was Rubinstein’s followup series minus Romero. As you can probly guess, the episodes center around different monsters. The credits boast having the legendary Dick Smith as a makeup consultant.
The show didn’t have any kind of host or wraparound at all, but the introduction shows a family of monsters watching TV together.
“Oh great, it’s Monsters! Our favorite show!” one of them says.
By human standards it would be pretty weird to have not seen a show you liked better than Monsters, but I can appreciate that there are many cultural differences and things that the monster community might pick up on in these stories that go right over my head.
Anyway, there were two Christmas-themed episodes. Glim-Glim, the 13th episode of the first season, was directed by Peter Stein (director of photography for FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2, C.H.U.D., PET SEMATARY and BRENDA STARR) and written by F. Paul Wilson (author of the novel that THE KEEP is based on). (read the rest of this shit…)
CASH ON DEMAND is a 1961 Christmas crime movie that I learned about from that Yuletide Terror book I keep mentioning. Though the book is about Christmas-themed horror movies they included this crime one because it’s a Hammer production starring the great Peter Cushing. Apparently he didn’t want to get stuck only playing Dr. Frankenstein and Van Helsing and shit, so the studio threw him a bone.
It’s a simple story with only a handful of characters, entirely limited to a couple locations inside and just in front of a small town bank. I thought it might be based on a play, with the black and white photography and the snow falling outside the window adding a very cinematic atmosphere. It was in fact a remake of a television episode by the same director, Quentin Lawrence (THE TROLLENBERG TERROR, THE SECRET OF BLOOD ISLAND). I guess that makes sense too. (read the rest of this shit…)
I don’t know why it took me more than 20 years, but I’ve finally seen JACK FROST, “not the Michael Keaton one, the other one,” as writer/director Michael Cooney says in his introduction to the (surprisingly) lovingly remastered Blu-Ray from Vinegar Syndrome. “The Michael Keaton one” (1998) is about a guy who tries to be a better father after dying and coming back as a snow man. “The other one” (1997) is the DTV horror movie about a serial killer who tries to continue serial killing after becoming a snowman.
He’s a crazy asshole on death row who actually does have the name Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald, LAST ACTION HERO). He tries to escape while being transported through Snowmonton, the small town where a small town sheriff (Christopher Allport, SAVAGE WEEKEND, TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., INVADERS FROM MARS) ended his cross country murder spree. But a truck full of some chemical from a super secret experiment – I don’t know, some Marvel Comics shit – explodes onto Jack and melts him into shriveled meat and his soul is transformed into liquid form or something so he is able to reconstitute himself into snow. And then, while coming after Sheriff Tiler for revenge, he ends up with coal eyes, a carrot nose, a scarf, stick eyebrows and sometimes a pipe. No magic hat required. (read the rest of this shit…)
THE MONSTER’S CHRISTMAS is a holiday special that aired on New Zealand television in 1981. I’m going to be up front and admit that I don’t have a whole lot of insightful things to say about this one, but it’s so charmingly weird that I felt like I owed it to the world to write it up and share some screengrabs so more people can know it exists.
It opens with a slasher-style P.O.V. into a window, but otherwise it’s only scary in an accidental sort of way. An unnamed little girl (Lucy McGrath, whose only other credit is NEARLY NO CHRISTMAS, a 1983 special from the same director) reads a picture book to her teddy bear. It’s “The Monster’s Christmas by Burton Silver,” which is not a real book, but that is the name of the screenwriter.
Then she hears a clatter so she goes to the living room where the Christmas tree is and spots a big rubber blob monster guy. Smoke billows from a hole in his head. He has one wiggling antenna and one eye. Rings of weird Koosh-ball-like tendrils pulsate around the eye as tears or something drip out.
“Hey, you’re not Father Christmas!” the girl says.
36.15 CODE PÈRE NOËL – a.k.a. WANTED: MR. XMAS, GAME OVER, DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS, HIDE AND FREAK, or DEADLY GAMES on the German Blu-Ray I rented – is an A+ Christmas action-horror cult movie from 1989 that I can’t believe I’d never heard of before. I read about it in the book Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television edited by Paul Corupe and Kier-La Janisse. That’s a small press book I pre-ordered last year and there was some mishap that caused it to be delivered a little after Christmas, so I had it set aside for 11 months, excited to bust it out this year.
As I go through it I’ve been making a long list of things to check out. This was at the top, but I can’t imagine anything else on the list will match it. I was convinced I was sitting on the mother of all Christmas recommendations here and then I asked a friend if he’d ever heard of it and… yeah, there’s a new A.G.F.A. restoration of it that was a big hit at Fantastic Fest this year and is even playing here in Seattle at the Grand Illusion this week.
Oh.
Still, I’m so excited to tell you guys about this one. Though it was made a year before HOME ALONE, it combines the kid-defending-his-house-at-Christmas concept with SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT killer Santa horror and tinges of Jean-Pierre Jeunet heightened reality. It’s so joyous in putting its young hero and his Danny-Cooksey-worthy spikey mullet through kid versions of ’80s action tropes that if I didn’t know it was from ’89 I’d assume it was a tribute movie made by some French answer to Taika Waititi. And yet it’s not at all a comedy. It absolutely works on the level of a serious stalk and slash movie, and it’s about serious ideas. (read the rest of this shit…)
Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to a movie, which I can prove because I seriously have been meaning to see this movie SHEITAN since it was the hot new horror movie out of France, and that was 11 years ago!
It’s about a group of young horny deadbeats – Bart (Olivier Barthelemy, MESRINE PART 2: PUBLIC ENEMY #1), Thai (Nicolas Le Phat Tan, no other credits) and Ladj (Ladj Ly, OUR DAY WILL COME) – who go clubbing on Christmas Eve Eve. They have no money and might get kicked out for not buying drinks, and they hassle their poor bartender friend Yasmine (Leila Bekhti, MESRINE PART 1: KILLER INSTINCT, A PROPHET) trying to get freebies. Bart is the biggest pain in the ass though because he hits on a girl who’s with her boyfriend, calls her an “ugly skank” when she won’t give him her phone number, ends up starting a fight and getting hit over the head with a bottle by a bouncer before getting thrown out. Well deserved.
But Yasmine introduced them to her childhood friend Eve (Roxane Mesquida, RUBBER) who sexy-dances with Thai and is super hot so these doofuses are all sniffing around her and are very amenable when she suggests “We can go to my place, in the country.” And they don’t know they’re in a horror movie, so they don’t know NEVER GO TO ANYBODY’S PLACE OUT IN THE COUNTRY. EVER! (read the rest of this shit…)
Sometimes you want a great Christmas movie, sometimes you want ELVES. This is a crappy still-only-on-VHS one, but it’s pretty fun. Two things you should know:
1. The title is completely fraudulent. There’s only one elf in it.
2. It’s a pretty different interpretation of elves from ELF or something like that. In this version he has nothing to do with helping Santa Claus. He’s a monster created by Nazi occultists to mate with a human and create the master race. On Christmas.
Our heroine is Kirsten, played by Julie Austin (EXTREME JUSTICE, TWISTED JUSTICE [that’s two titles, although it would also be cool as one title]). She’s either a teenager or a young adult who’s a waitress at a department store “snack bar,” hates Christmas and wants it to snow. She doesn’t know that her grandfather (Borah Silver, BLUE COLLAR, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK) is a Nazi who buried an elf out in the woods and also is her father and that she was inbred to be “perfect” because she’s the one who’s supposed to mate with the elf on Christmas Eve. Which are all things that are important to know. (read the rest of this shit…)
BETTER WATCH OUT is a non-supernatural, non-Killer-Santa Christmas horror movie with a fun feel to it, but with deeply uncomfortable undertones. Or maybe it’s overtones. In fact I’m gonna say it’s deeply uncomfortable overtones and undertones with just a thin layer in the middle of that fun feeling I mentioned. It’s not particularly gruesome or anything, it’s just that the psychology of the villainy is fucked up in a way that got under my skin. There is a physical threat, but it’s more about creeping you out that there are people out there who think like this.
It mostly stars the youths. There’s the kid that played Peter Pan in PAN (Levi Miller) and the two kids from THE VISIT (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould). There are other characters, like Patrick Warburton (THE WOMAN CHASER) and Virginia Madsen (CANDYMAN) as the parents of Miller’s character, but much of the movie is just between those three kids. (read the rest of this shit…)
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We’re mostly agreed these days that BAD SANTA is a timeless Christmas classic, right? I have friends and loved ones who it’s too mean for, and it got brutal critical reception at the time, done no favors by Miramax insisting on more ball punching and shit so the theatrical and “BADDER SANTA” cuts could fit some lowbrow comedy marketing strategy that must’ve worked for them on SCARY MOVIE or something. The superior director’s cut has been available for years now, and now I watch that and mourn the loss of one dumb joke from the theatrical ending:
PUPPET MASTER VS. DEMONIC TOYS came out the year after FREDDY VS. JASON and a few months before 
Do you remember the syndicated TV show Monsters that ran in the late ’80s? I don’t really either, but I do remember seeing commercials for it. It was a horror anthology series produced by Richard P. Rubinstein, the guy who co-founded Laurel Entertainment with George Romero and produced MARTIN, 
CASH ON DEMAND is a 1961 Christmas crime movie that I learned about from that 
I don’t know why it took me more than 20 years, but I’ve finally seen JACK FROST, “not the Michael Keaton one, the other one,” as writer/director Michael Cooney says in his introduction to the (surprisingly) lovingly remastered Blu-Ray from Vinegar Syndrome. “The Michael Keaton one” (1998) is about a guy who tries to be a better father after dying and coming back as a snow man. “The other one” (1997) is the DTV horror movie about a serial killer who tries to continue serial killing after becoming a snowman.
THE MONSTER’S CHRISTMAS is a holiday special that aired on New Zealand television in 1981. I’m going to be up front and admit that I don’t have a whole lot of insightful things to say about this one, but it’s so charmingly weird that I felt like I owed it to the world to write it up and share some screengrabs so more people can know it exists.
36.15 CODE PÈRE NOËL – a.k.a. WANTED: MR. XMAS, GAME OVER, DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS, HIDE AND FREAK, or DEADLY GAMES on the German Blu-Ray I rented – is an A+ Christmas action-horror cult movie from 1989 that I can’t believe I’d never heard of before. I read about it in the book 
Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to a movie, which I can prove because I seriously have been meaning to see this movie SHEITAN since it was the hot new horror movie out of France, and that was 11 years ago!
Sometimes you want a great Christmas movie, sometimes you want ELVES. This is a crappy still-only-on-VHS one, but it’s pretty fun. Two things you should know:
BETTER WATCH OUT is a non-supernatural, non-Killer-Santa Christmas horror movie with a fun feel to it, but with deeply uncomfortable undertones. Or maybe it’s overtones. In fact I’m gonna say it’s deeply uncomfortable overtones and undertones with just a thin layer in the middle of that fun feeling I mentioned. It’s not particularly gruesome or anything, it’s just that the psychology of the villainy is fucked up in a way that got under my skin. There is a physical threat, but it’s more about creeping you out that there are people out there who think like this.
