Christmas Cruelty

Director(s) - Per-Ingvar Tomren (School of the Dead, Banzai Motherfucker!) and Magne Steinsvoll (Killungard)

Starring - Eline Aasheim (Headless Entanglement), Tormod Lien (Karachi, Hotel Caesar), and Magne Steinsvoll 

Release Date - 2013

Genre - Horror

Tagline - "This Christmas Santa is going postal"

Format - Bluray (Personal Collection) (Screener)

Rating (out of 5):

     I know most horror fans look forward to October and Halloween. Hell, I do too but I’m fucking obsessed with Christmas and this has only been amplified since I’ve started a family. I love decorating, going for drives to look at all the Christmas lights, and more importantly, the Christmas themed horror films. If you ask me, I’ll be completely honest with you and say that there is not enough Christmas horror films out there. With that being said, not every Christmas horror flick I review is good. Case in point is the 2013 Norwegian horror film Christmas Cruelty. I remember seeing this one make it’s rounds in the horror groups but I never wanted to fork out the absurd amount of money for a DVD release and my patience paid off. Unearthed Films recently put the film out on blu and my friends over at MVD were kind enough to send a review copy my way. 

    The film follows a group of young adults who prepare to party during the holiday season. What they don’t know is that there is another man preparing for the holiday who has a different way of celebrating the holiday which includes rape and bloodshed. 

      I don’t know if reviewing horror titles every day for the last 10 years, along with watching them every day for two some odd years, has desensitized me or Christmas Cruelty is not as brutal as I was led to believe. The last twenty minutes or so was graphic and extremely enjoyable but I’ve seen movies that are far worse and done better. The acting in this one was pretty solid. Reading a movie does take away from the impact but I was able to keep pace with the subtitles and enjoy the cast. The characters are fairly generic, but the cast really does go all in. It would have been a lot more enjoyable and easier to pay attention if the characters did have a bit more energy and personality. The story for this one is so fucking simple, yet it fails to pull it all together into something that you can enjoy year after year as the temperatures drop. A group of twenty-somethings or young adults getting together to party for Christmas before a maniac in a Santa costume arrives to cause havoc is nothing new nor is it something, we haven’t seen at least a dozen times over the last 30 to 40 years. However, it still has potential to be something memorable especially if it goes the extreme route… which I don’t think it actually did. The baby in the bouncy with the circular saw was funny but extremely cheap and not effective at all. The last twenty minutes were more action packed but the hour or so of dialogue heavy scenes with very little story progression. It moves at a snail’s pace through the first hour before moving to the faster paced ending that delivers the bang. Finally, the film has some decent effects for the most part but a few of them were rather funny rather it was intentional or not. I liked the use of practical effects for the most part but the scene with the baby was just so goofy and out of place that it threw the tone of the film off. Overall, Christmas Cruelty is a film that ends with a fucking bang but the hour or so build up doesn’t do it any favors. I wanted to enjoy this one but the dead pan scenes we get for 60 minutes made me almost turn it off several times. If you want some fun gore I recommend fast forwarding through most of this one.