Last time on Weird Movie of the Week, we covered a remake of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain that is composed entirely of salvaged clips from old dog movies and VHS tapes. This time we’ve got some Holiday Horror:
A Christmas Horror Story has a lot going for it. It’s from several of the creative minds behind the Ginger Snaps trilogy (Grant Harvey, Steven Hoban and Brett Sullivan) and takes place in Ginger and Brigitte’s fictional town of Bailey Downs; it stars William Shatner as a drunk, hyper-conservative radio DJ full of holiday cheer; it features Krampus and zombie elves. Like any horror anthology, there are great moments and there are weak moments, but its framework is cleverly constructed, tying all of the vignettes together in an interesting way that isn’t revealed until the final act.
So the fact that it is a Holiday Horror movie is not, in itself, very weird. There’s lots of them, and we’ve covered this territory before. Repeatedly. Nor is it that it comes from the folks who made Ginger Snaps (an original take on the werewolf story, to be sure, but not quite weird). No, what sold me on this was the Shatner line: “it stars William Shatner as a drunk, hyper-conservative radio DJ full of holiday cheer”. Inspired. I’m all in.
The review isn’t exactly glowing, but few of these movies are actually very good. As it mentions, it’s clearly inspired by Trick ‘r Treat, one of the best horror anthologies ever made (surely the most consistently good and interconnected), which is funny, because this movie supposedly features the Krampus, an obscure Santa precursor that represents Santa’s… darker side (many precursors are actually two separate people, one to give gifts to all the good boys and girls, the other to punish the not-so-good). It turns out that Trick ‘r Treat’s writer/director Michael Dougherty is releasing his own take on Krampus during this holiday season. It’s an embarrassment of riches for Holiday Horror fans this year. Looking forward to it.