“I just got my ass kicked by Christmas cookies!”
Directed by: Michael Dougherty
Written by: Todd Casey, Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields
Starring: Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koecher, Allison Tolman, Emjay Anthony
The H-Bomb: Poor little Max (Emjay Anthony) is having one crappy Christmas. First, he gets into a fight with another kid at a department store, then, his Aunt (Allison Tolman) and Uncle (David Koechner), and their pack of obnoxious, idiot children arrive to stink up the joint and eat all of the Christmas treats his sweet old grandmother (Krista Stadler) made for him. Add to that, Max’s own parents, Tom (Adam Scott) and Sarah (Toni Collette), seem to have lost all their passion for the holidays (and apparently, their marriage, as well).
Despite all this, Max still holds out hope of having a Merry little Christmas. However, such hopes are dashed when one of Max’s asshole cousins pulls an absolute dick move at the dinner table, causing him to tear up his annual letter to Santy Claus, and telling the Christmas holiday to go suck a duck. What Max doesn’t know, is that old St. Nick doesn’t like to suck ducks, and that rejecting the Christmas spirit can have dire consequences.
Legend has it, there exists kind of an anti-Santa, a spirit known as Krampus, who will show up at the homes of naughty children to piss on their milk and cookies, and worse. Far worse. Sounds like a kid’s story, not to be taken seriously, but then, strange shit starts going down. The power at Max’s house goes out, a mysterious snowman appears in the front yard, and a member of the family goes missing. Before long, this most dysfunctional brood finds itself having to come together, in order to fend off an evil force that is not there to give, but to take… their lives.
In 2007, Michael Dougherty made a spooky cool anthology film called Trick ‘r Treat, that instantly became an annual must watch for me every October. It wasn’t scary, per se, but it was certainly clever, and fun, and captured the Halloween atmosphere perfectly. Needless to say, I was a little psyched to check out Dougherty’s follow up, Krampus, a horror film set against a Christmas backdrop. After all, he did such a fantastic job with a Halloween setting, there’s no way he could go wrong with this one, right? Right???
Uggh… damn it…
Essentially, Krampus is Christmas Vacation meets Poltergeist. I kid thee not. After all, Uncle Howard, Aunt Linda and their kids are pretty much carbon copies of Randy Quaid’s Cousin Eddie and his ill-mannered flock. Not to mention, the plethora of creepy dolls coming to life, as well as all other sorts of supernatural shenanigans, such as things flying around, and kids going missing, are all lifted straight out of Poltergeist… because, if there’s one thing 2015 needed, it was another shitty Poltergeist retread.
Krampus is a colossal disappointment. A film based around a genuinely dark and intriguing Christmas myth, that in the hands of this director had the potential to be one hell of a unique little fright flick. Instead, Dougherty and his co-writers opt to go down the road most-traveled with this material, resulting in an utterly derivative horror-comedy that is neither funny enough to work as a comedy, or scary enough to even remotely work as a horror film, and winds up failing epically at being both.
The sad part is, Krampus begins promisingly enough. The opening slow-motion montage, featuring a mob of psychotic shoppers being trampled, beaten, and tased, is goddamn hilarious. From there, the film was actually shaping up to be better than I thought it would be, Bad Santa with some horror mixed in, and for the first half hour or so, I was laughing consistently. Then, once the disastrous Christmas dinner is over, the film switches gears, as some eerie shit starts to happen, and it’s at that point that Krampus gradually unravels and flushes itself straight down the krapper.
The horror aspects start off strong, with some monster thing burrowing under the snow, snatching kids, and destroying vehicles. Then Krampus transitions into a chamber piece, with the family boarding up the windows, holing up in the living room, and waiting for whatever is out there to get in. Could’ve been creepy and claustrophobic. Instead it becomes a tedious, static slog, as the story momentum grinds to a dead stop. Forget about some vengeful spirit killing them, these dip-ships will die of sheer boredom before that ever happens. When a movie that’s a mere ninety minutes feels like a fucking eternity, you know something has gone horribly, horribly awry.
I almost want to believe that the studio took this thing away from Dougherty, forced a load of stupid shit into it, and totally fucked up what was initially a good movie. Sucks to say, there is no evidence of that happening, so I must lay the blame for this dull, moronic mess entirely at the director’s feet. And Holy Moses does this shit get fucking dumb. Once it transitions into a full-on horror flick, it goes full retard and never looks back, with killer gingerbread men, and killer Predator-faced clown dolls… just pure stupid. Not to mention, nothing that happens is even mildly creepy.
Even the onslaught of special effects we get in the latter half of the film is entirely ineffectual. The effects are mostly practical, which is commendable, but they have no impact, whatsoever. The monsters are not scary, and there is no tension to speak of, because most of these characters are so bloody contemptible, we don’t give two shits what happens to them. Hell, the sooner this Krampus thing eats their asses, the better. I haven’t even touched on the dogshit cinematography, with lighting so piss poor, it’s difficult to discern what’s happening half the time, anyway.
It’s kind of a shame, really, as the cast here is pretty game. Adam Scott doesn’t exactly scream action hero, but when he grabs a gun to defend his family, I believed it. Toni Collette fairs just as well early on, as a tired, exasperated housewife who can barely stand being around her relatives, and David Koechner practically steals the show as the boorish, thoughtless uncle. His character was a complete blowhole, but I kind of liked him, anyway. The actors are good, it’s simply that their characters are, for the most part, cartoonishly unsympathetic, and painfully grating. Whenever one of them meets a bloody (but not too bloody, for PG-13’s sake) demise, it comes as a slight relief.
Krampus could’ve and should’ve been something special. Another minor classic in the vein of Trick ‘r Treat. Instead, it’s a shoddy, derivative bore. A watered down waste of a film that isn’t quite as bad as the krap that gets churned out of Blumhouse on a bi-monthly basis, but is pretty close. After Trick ‘r Treat, I thought Dougherty knew what he was doing, now I have severe doubts. He had a fiendishly grim premise, a game cast, a top notch effects team… everything to deliver one hell of a nasty holiday treat. The only thing missing, was a solid script. Sadly, a good script is kind of important, and without that, a movie, no matter how much money you throw at it, will be humbug, and Krampus is pure humbug.
