Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1960) 1h 31m

My very first note for this film was "I made a mistake."  Never Take Sweets from a Stranger is part of a $10 Hammer Films collection I picked up from Wal-Mart not long ago.  They have a better one with better films for double the price but I wanted to have  the bottom shelf stuff.  This is certainly the bottom as I assumed I was going to get the usual Hammer lesbian vampires or whatever.  Instead I saw into the eyes of the devil and he winked at me.

Look at this fucking stranger danger!

Never Take Sweets from a Stranger opens with an old creeper using binoculars to watch two younger girls play.  When one of the girls looses her "sweets money" the other says that she knows where they can get some candy and run towards the old man's house.  Upon returning home for the evening one of the girls relays her day to her parents, not even flinching at the part where she and her friend danced naked while the old man watched.  The family is taken aback and the mother gets the whole story.  When she comes back both her husband and her mother (or mother-in-law, I couldn't tell) downplay the incident and I was losing my mind.  Eventually we get a court case where the defending lawyer rips into the small girl like an absolute scum bag.  The man is found innocent and goes free, only to later find the girls playing in the woods, stalks them, and ends up killing one of them.

I hated this movie.  I hated every fucking second of it.  Not because it was a bad film.  As far as random films from 1960 go this was more than competent.  I hated this because it showed just how horrible human beings can be.  A lot of the town had stories of that old man doing inappropriate things, the grandmother had a story of a man exposing himself to her every day as a child and she just wrote it off like that was normal.  The police, holy fuck the police in this film, pull the "You know he and his family built this town so you should change your mind..." thing and were just evil.  Then the old man's son that was just throwing around his power and influence to protect his nasty ass father.  Acting as if letting the girl's dad keep his job as principal to show that there were "no hard feelings" is anywhere near acceptable.  I've never wanted someone punched in the face as much as I wanted that guy.  I screamed it at the end of the movie but apparently no one heard me through the TV and like 58 years in the past.

A lot of the time horror films will pull the "we were the real evil all along!!!" trope but this is just "humanity is evil" from start to finish.  Don't watch this.  It's uncomfortable and somewhat depressing.   The very end of my notes say "I hate the world now," which is how you leave Never Take Sweets from a Stranger.

I give Never Take Sweets from a Stranger 0 Stranger Danger images out of 5:

13 Days of Christmas Day 8: Christmas Evil (1980) 1h 40m

Despite coming up on the two-year anniversary of this blog, I haven't seen a lot of films that the ending happens and I question what the hell I just watched but... What the hell did I just watch?!

Christmas Evil focuses on that creepy guy that lives in your neighborhood that is into Christmas just a bit too much.  After the childhood trauma of finding out Santa wasn't real (or maybe just that Santa was about to bang his mom under the tree) Harry focuses his entire life to be Santa.  He spies on and keeps logs on the children in the neighborhood, he works in a toy factory, and he sews his own Santa suit.  A series of odd comments and phone calls with his brother show just how unwound Harry is becoming.  For the most part he is genuinely giving good kids presents but then he murders a guy from his job and some random people that talk shit on him outside of a church.  Eventually a torch bearing crowd starts to chase down Harry and his van but he just crashes through a fence and off a cliff.  Instead of crashing, the van flies through the air and into the night.  Kind of like the end of Repo Man only you just watched a terrible Christmas horror film instead of a true classic.

I opted to watch Christmas Evil instead of take a nap and that was a horrible mistake.  Everything about this film made me feel dirty.  The awkward garter play between Santa and the mom went on for way too long.  The fact that there's a nine-year-old cutting naked women out of a porno mag is weird, and then it ties into "bad hygiene" when marked in the "bad kids" book leads to an indescribable discomfort.  There's a scene where Harry covers his face in mud and leaves hand prints and a kiss mark on the side of the same kid's house.

Then there's the odd Repo Frankenstein ending.  What the hell was that mess?  Why did that exist?  Who wrote this?  Why did I watch this?  Why was this made?  Fuck this movie!

I give Christmas Evil 0 ripped Santas out of 5: