Deathcember Review: Less An Advent Calendar Horror Anthology More of a Santa Kill Count Drinking Game

 

 

Deathcember

$4.99 to rent

 

A Christmas horror movie to remember and share has been a long time coming. And it's gonna be a long time coming still as Deathcember wastes all 24 chances. Watching with a group of friends is worth the rental to just admonish it or just drink every time Santa gets whacked, but if you're here for a decent horror anthology or the subgenre of X-Mas horror, you're getting coal this year.

Clocking in at 2 hours and 25, a lot of it is just end credits, you're getting bit-sized holiday horror with many ridiculous Santa's deaths, reindeer guts and brutality very unwholesome situations for the season. The problem is the inconsistency of the directors, actors and writers. Oddly, all the cinematographers did a really good job. But, they can't save Christmas or this movie.

You're welcomed to the film by a CGI mansion with different items strewn about a living room. Why not a wraparound story where a family hands each other gifts? With these items connecting each story? That would have made more sense and I just came up with it, while writing this. Instead you get a kind of fun calendar space opening up around the CGI image and then going down a blood/meat whole for each story. Then, back to the living room.

24 stories with sometimes good connections to Christmas. Or at least 2 times no connection, that the group or myself couldn't decipher. And then sometimes really stretching how it's connecting to Christmas come up. But for sure, usually an unresolved ending or just stupid ending will be shown. Why pull away from murder in a horror anthology? What, why no pay-off to your short?

It's such a grab bag of random that you'll be choosing what was your favorite and the one my friends and I probably rooted the most for was the Gumby rip-off gem of Crappy Christmas, which is beyond NSFW. I'm not telling you Jack about it other than it's not for kids and bad things happen to the one in this short.

My personal favorite was All Sales Fatal, which shares with us the fun of Christmas shopping and was definitely shot in LA. Love the use of a staple gun, though it could never work they way it did in the film.

From the consensus of the group many films could have been cut and it had nothing to do with being too over-the-top. We seemed to enjoy those the most. It's how some just weren't worthy to even put in.

Looking back on it, it's all for laughs any maybe WTF's. It's in no way a Christmas classic. It's more like someone threw whatever holiday decorations they had left in a garbage bag and beat it and they threw it around a CGI living room.You're renting it for the novelty of it being an advent calendar, not for anything else. Rent for fun and be done with it.

*There's a special 25th film after the credits.