13 Days of Christmas Day 12: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) 1h 24m

I don't really dig the Coca-Cola created Santa Claus.  I also don't really dig Christmas, so maybe it all gets lumped in together.  I do dig the concept of an evil Santa (and I'm not talking about another fucking Krampus movie!!).  I also listen to a lot of metal, including a decent cropping of black metal.  So how do all of these things come together?  Well, that's where Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale comes in.
 
Set in Finland (and mostly in Finnish), an eccentric old man has an excavation team digging up something frozen deep inside a mountain.  When the local reindeer farmers lose their herd to an unknown creature, and a naked old man ends up in one of their wolf traps, they scramble to make sense of what's going on while only a single child has everything figured out.

Rare Exports is metal as fuck!  Being set in Finland and in Finnish helps but there are some awesome illustrations of Santa sitting on thrones of skulls and punishing children.  The only actual visuals of Santa we get is him encased in ice but it looks like it should be the cover of a Iced Earth or maybe Amon Amarth album.  Also, an army of naked old men carrying pick axes in the middle of Finland's winter is kind of a frightening thought.

There is really only one reservation I have with this movie.  It felt a little slow but not enough that it drags you.  After a half-hour I thought I was much further into the film than I was, but that was the only point when I checked the clock.  Actually, the other reservation I have is that the kid runs outside in a sweater, some fucking Ugg looking boots, and just briefs on.  You might be used to the cold but no one is that used to it, especially a male.  Trust me, the cold does things... horrible things.

I give Rare Exports 4 ripped Santas 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:

13 Days of Christmas Day 5: Silent Night Deadly Night (1984) 1h 19m

One of the quintessential holiday horror films, along with Black Christmas and a few others I'm going to cover on here, Silent Night Deadly Night seems to be the most remembered.  Since Thanksgiving has passed, images of this film have been plastered all over my social media feeds.  My own personal aversion to Christmas kept me from watching this previously but no longer!  I have joined the SNDN cult!

Silent Night Deadly Night focuses on a boy named Billy.  His family visits his grandfather in a mental hospital where the grandfather secretly tells Billy that Santa will punish the boy for not being good all year.  On their drive home the parents stop to help a man dressed as Santa on the side of the road.  This Santa is some sort of lunatic criminal that kills the father and then rips open the shirt of the mother before he cuts her throat.  Billy hides but sees all of this and becomes ultra traumatized toward Santa Claus.  He and his baby brother are then taken to an orphanage run by nuns where the Mother Superior has incredibly old-fashioned (even for the time) views of child psychology and corporal punishment.  As if Billy weren't fucked up enough, she just makes it worse.  Finally, in the "present day" of the film, Billy has a job at a toy store where he ends up playing the store Santa.  After a few drinks at the holiday party and walking into an attempted rape by one of his co-workers, Billy has a flashback and then just goes on a murderous rampage.

I'm sure that when this film was being written they were just looking for plot reasons to have Billy snap.  The thing that floored me with Silent Night Deadly Night was the fact that from a psychological point of view everything makes sense.  The initial trauma toward Santa based on real life events, the fear of punishment for being "naughty," the aversion to sex and the association of violence with it and the baring of the female body, these are all relevant reasons for Billy's emotional response.  Granted, this is an extreme expression of it, but the inclusion of alcohol (which he had no previous experience with) would lead to a lowering of inhibitions.  The only thing is once he started, he just didn't stop.

With that analysis out of the way, I liked Silent Night Deadly Night.  It's dated, but for someone like me it felt nostalgic.  Seeing He-Man toys on a shelf or the weird inflatable bunny that everyone had for Easter let me go back to the 80's without an issue.  I found myself only caring about Billy as far as the characters go.  Though, with a holiday slasher, everyone is pretty much expendable.  This movie also spawned a few sequels which I may watch at some point.  However, if I take anything away from this movie, it's going to be just shouting "NAUGHTY!" at the cats when they misbehave.

I give Silent Night Deadly Night 4 ripped Santas out of 5:

A Christmas Horror Story (2015) 1h 39m

I'm not a fan of Christmas.  I haven't been since I was a teenager and as I aged into adulthood I liked it even less.  The only movie I readily acknowledge as a Christmas movie is Die Hard and fuck the rest.  So finding out I was about to watch A Christmas Horror Story meant that I was prepared to zone out over the next hour and a half.  However, as the song goes... you better watch out!

A Christmas Horror Story is an anthology of four different story lines that all share small intersections.  We have one where a zombie plague spreads through Santa's elves and Santa fucks some shit up with a sharpened staff.  Another involves three maybe high school or early college kids as they go to film in an old convent where some mysterious murders took place a year ago.  Number three has a nuclear family facing off against Krampus.  The final one is a boy and his parents going out to get a Christmas tree from way out in the boonies off of someone's property and the son suddenly goes missing.

That's all I'm giving you as far as this film because it was honestly fun to watch.  The story lines all interweave as far as what you're watching so it's less of a Tales from the Crypt style and more of a cohesive movie.  They do a great job of what I can only refer to as horror edging because they will build up to an exciting point in one story and back you off by switching to another and building again.  My greatest complaint though was that I only liked two of the four endings (Santa's story and the Krampus story).  This doesn't make the other two stories bad, just not what I would've enjoyed as a climax.

Other randomness from this film includes William Shatner as "Dangerous Dan" the radio DJ who fucking loves Christmas and Jesus.  He has a great line of "You know who saw that?  Jesus! And his dad!" when someone shows him a sign that says "FUCK CHRISTMAS." David Hayter was an executive producer.  You might know him as the voice of Solid Snake in the US versions of almost all of the Metal Gear Solid games (except for the last few where Kiefer Sutherland took over).  Finally, and this is more of a personal observation, the singing over the opening credits sounds like it was done by the same program they use for Hatsune Miku.  That's more of my nerdy shit though.

I give A Christmas Horror Story 4 copies of King Diamond's No Presents for Christmas out of 5:

Don't forget, you can follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/30daysofplight or on Twitter @30daysofplight