Christmas Bloody Christmas Review

Christmas Bloody Christmas is an original film for Shudder and sees the Santa slasher subgenre get a high-tech twist.

Tori (Riley Dandy) is a record store owner and Robbie (Sam Delich) is her employee. They plan to spend their Christmas Eve drinking and partying. Their plans get horribly interrupted when the robotic Santa in the toy store malfunctions and goes on a killing spree.

Christmas Bloody Christmas was aiming to be a throwback to slasher films of the ‘70s and ‘80s. It wanted to be a grindhouse film with a simple hook. In this film’s case, its killer was a robot dressed as Santa. Christmas Bloody Christmas did get one thing right with its ‘70s/’80s aesthetic: the sync score. It sounded like a film from that era. If the score was the first thing being praised then it was a sign that Christmas Bloody Christmas had a lot of issues.

Christmas Bloody Christmas opened with some mock commercials which made it seem like the film was going to have a light, tongue-in-cheek approach. These commercials featured one for a whiskey that the whole family can enjoy and showed the robotic Santas replacing degenerate mall Santas. The Santas were built by a military company that hinted at things to come and brought to mind the film Small Soldiers where military-grade chips were put in toys.

Hopes of Christmas Bloody Christmas being a fairly light-hearted slasher were dashed when the robot Santa started to kill. The first kills were shown from the robot’s point-of-view and one of them was the robot smashing a woman’s head into a cabinet. This put a bad taste in the mouth because it was shocking and exploitative.

This showed one of the biggest problems with Christmas Bloody Christmas, a jarring tone. It had a silly opening then wanted the audience to have fun and then everything else was treated with absolute seriousness. Charitably it could be argued that this was an attempt at misdirection but in reality it was bad direction. The film would have been more impactful if it had cut out this prologue of commercials.

One of the selling points of the film was it a Christmas horror film with an evil Santa. However, the robot being Santa didn’t seem to matter too much. It just went around with an axe and killed everyone it came across. The robot could have been a toy soldier, a ballerina, or anything else. The filmmakers could have had fun with this. The robot could have really thought it was Santa but its programming was faulty, leading to it seeing everyone being naughty, like Robot Santa in Futurama. Or the robot could have seen a child being bullied or abused and taken things into its own hands to protect the child. Some Christmassy and winter-related kills would have sufficed like what happened in Violent Night.

Nor did it help that the characters were unlikeable. Tori was a rock snob and a contrarian when she talked about horror franchises. She always liked the most maligned film in a franchise. Tori and Robbie were both hard-drinking and hard-swearing individuals who were destined to fuck. It was a film that was filled with the use of the F word and even had a couple of uses of the C word. I wanted the robot to cleave Tori in the head because she was that obnoxious.

Christmas Bloody Christmas was a bare bones film. Excluding the credits, the runtime was only 81 minutes which was short in this day and age. This short run time showed with minimal characterisation and rushing when the killing started.

Christmas Bloody Christmas was a film that treated its material too seriously to be fun and it was too silly to be taken seriously. It was an unpleasant entry in the slasher genre.