Happy New Year!!

To absent friends!  Happy New Year!  Also, we start our next cut on Sunday, January 7th!  See you then!

13 Days of Christmas Day 13: Gremlins (1984) 1h 46m

When I set out to do the 13 Days of Christmas I knew that I wanted to end it with Gremlins.  I hadn't watched the film in years and, oddly enough, it might have been the first horror film I ever watched as a kid.  It was one of those films that everyone saw at a young age when it came out.  It also was one of three movies that I liked that had a jump scare that freaked me out at a young age (the other two being Large Marge in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and the librarian ghost at the beginning of Ghostbusters).  My big question coming into this was would Gremlins live up to my nostalgia for it?

If you've never seen this film, let me sum it up for you:  An inventor comes across a strange creature known as a Mogwai while in Chinatown.  He acquires it from the shopkeeper's grandson and brings it home as a present for Billy.  There are three rules with the Mogwai: 1) no bright lights and sunlight can kill him, 2) do not feed him after midnight, and 3) never ever get him wet.  Needless to say two of these three happen and what was once a cute a fuzzy Mogwai spawns a mass of horrible green gremlins which kill and terrorize the town.

It was weird to watch this after such a long time and actually attempt to keep track of the body count.  There are four confirmed deaths that we see and then a load of other unconfirmed ones that we never know for sure (except the guy playing Santa lives but you have to be paying attention to background noise to find that out on a newscast).  The puppets still hold up visually and there isn't a single weak link in the casting.  Even the fucking dog is a good actor!

There are a lot of plot holes with this film, mainly revolving around the rules.  I'm not getting into it aside from the fact that snow apparently doesn't count as getting them wet.  For people that want to argue the booze, that gets handled in the official graphic novelization.  As far as my nostalgia, it was hurt a bit because I realized that this film isn't far off from just becoming a B-movie.  It isn't, but it skates such a fine line that if the quality of this film drooped at all then it wouldn't be what it is.

On a side note, as mean as this may be, I still cheered when Mrs. Deagle shot out of that window.

I give Gremlins 4 ripped Santas out of 5:

And with that, the 13 Days of Christmas come to an end.  We'll be back to our regular reviews on Sunday, January 7th.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good holiday if you're celebrating something around this time.  If not, then I still just wish you well.  See you in a few weeks!

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 11: A Very Zombie Holiday (2010) 3m 11sec

Okay, I'm taking some liberties with this one as it isn't really a short film per se.  It's listed on IMDB as an "episode" but it's horror and it's Christmas, and if you want to challenge me on this then you can choke on a Santa sack full of dicks.

A Very Zombie Holiday is a 50's style instructional video on how to juggle both the holidays and the possibility of zombies.  Put out by Team Unicorn (an all female geek-focused multimedia team), I'm including it in this horror advent calendar because if you haven't watched it yet then you really should.  If not for the fun factor, then for the educational factor.  This could save your life this holiday!

I loved A Very Zombie Holiday.  I wish they would take this a bit further because I would love to see a horror film with a group of badass 1950's housewives banding together to take on zombies.  Think about it.  The weapons would consist of associated things like irons or sharpened pie plates, they could take "diet pills" before a big battle, and one could use their "hysteria treatment device" to kill a zombie (although that's a stretch for the time period).  Team Unicorn, hit me up!  Let's make this happen!

I give A Very Zombie Holiday 5 ripped Santas out of 5:

13 Days of Christmas Day 10: Better Watch Out (2016) 1h 29m

I watched Better Watch Out with my husband and by the end of it the household consensus was "fuck this film."  Then, later that night, there were a lot of other horror people in my Twitter feed talking about how much they liked it.  So this made me revisit my initial write-off of this film.  Was there something I missed?  Was there something they missed?  What lead to such a difference in opinion?  So I took some more time to really sit back and think about this film and have a discussion with my significant other to figure out what the deal is.  So let's get into it.

Better Watch Out is about Ashley being home for the holidays and agreeing to babysit Luke.  Never mind that Luke is 12 and probably doesn't need a baby sitter, or the fact that he wants to seduce Ashley, because that's not creepy.  After what seems like a home invasion, Ashley uncovers Luke and his friend's plan to scare her and make Luke seem like a hero because "white males."  When she goes to call Luke's parents he slaps her so she falls down the stairs and then the film takes its turn.

I'm honestly still up in the air with this film.  There are a lot of really small holes in it that are easy to miss but when you start to unravel the sweater you're just left with a pile of loose threads.  I suspected a heel turn a little bit before it happened, mainly because Luke appeared to have issues with the concept of "consent" with how he was trying to hit on Ashley early on.  On top of that, he didn't look 12.  This isn't a slight against the actor whom I think did a great job in his role, he just didn't add to the fact that this adolescent had a babysitter.  We also don't get any motivation for why Luke has his initial plan, or why he takes things so far, aside from he is a sociopath and seems to feel entitled to Ashley.  I can write a million paragraphs about why this is a problematic view, but to avoid turning this into a socio-political rant I will make the following statement:

In regards to horror, one of the most successful things a film can do is scare us by making the horror relatable.

Did Better Watch Out do that for me?  Yes, it did.  It did so for all of the wrong reasons.  While part of me wants to call this some adolescent jerk-off fantasy pushed too far, this has a believable component up to a certain point and that made me uncomfortable.  So as a horror film, it did what it set out to do.  It might not be on its terms, but, well, mission accomplished I guess.

I give Better Watch Out 2.5 ripped Santas out of 5:

13 Days of Christmas Day 9: Treevenge (2008) 16m

I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to track down a copy of Treevenge.  All I knew is that it was a short film about Christmas trees finally getting their payback.  It made me think of that Christmas episode of Metalocalypse where they talk bout how brutal a Christmas tree really is.  This thing:

Treevenge is a short film out of Canada where Christmas trees finally get sick of of the genocide of their race and get revenge on humanity.  We go from the harvesting of the trees straight up to the holiday season and the inevitable revolution against their captors.  There's not much more than that.

With an idea like Treevenge, this movie knew what it was going for and ran for the goal line.  The humans are all overacted and vulgar (in more than just language), as opposed to the trees that all have well written and fearful conversations.  That's a sentence I never thought I would ever write.  There are some really great kills including a tree stump stomping a baby and then dragging it away.  I couldn't even stay mad at the tree that killed the family cat because it then threw the fakest stuffed cat at the family and I laughed.

I tracked down a copy of this on YouTube if you want to watch it.  There are some bullshit ones that tell you to visit their site to watch it.  Just look for the 16 minute version.  It's worth at least one watch, although I might make it a yearly thing just to remind myself that I could make a short film too... and then probably not do it.  But the point is that I could if I wanted to!

I give Treevenge 3.5 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: