Director: Steve Davis
Year: 2015
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Slasher
Plot:
Following her boyfriends' attempted infidelity, a woman joining her friends at a holiday getaway at a remote mountain lodge find themselves being stalked by an escaped deranged serial killer dressed as Santa Claus and forces them to band together to escape from the killer.
Review:
Frankly, this one wasn't all that great of a Santa-slasher. One of the main problems with this one stems from the film's exceptionally low-budget look and feel which runs rampant throughout here and doesn't give this a chance at times. The cheap, cramped locations and just home-made look really give this one the overwhelming sense of a low-budget affair which is much grander than the type of story is supposed to tell which just makes the whole thing look worse than it really should. The technical aspects here, from the camera work to the editing and the sets, really screams low-budget quality and is done to the point of being detrimental more than it really is. That facet carries over into the special effects for the kills, which is a shame as there's quite a large body-count and simply throwing red-colored liquid along the walls and only showing the aftereffect of what he did with the body rather than seeing it play out on-screen. Cutting to black whenever it's supposedly going for a kill only to come back seeing what he actually did really screams a cheap, low-budget affair and hinders this one considerably.
Likewise, the film also manages to feature that same utterly dreadful pacing that plagues so many British horror films of the recent millennium as this one drags on forever without any kind of enthusiasm in what's happening featuring characters so laid-back that they rarely seem interested in anything going on around them which tends to drop the energy level to a barely-breathing crawl here which ends up hurting the film overall as much as these other issues. The last flaw here is the decidedly weak and completely pathetic killer which doesn't really strike any ounce of fear looking simply like a homeless man wearing a cheap Santa jacket, offers up no real reasoning for the obsession with Santa or the holiday and comes off like a total joke in how easily he's dealt with in the end that this one really suffers for such a lousy job with the main villain.
While these here hold it back, there's a few solid moments present when it counts. Even though it's most hurt by the effects used to create them, the fact that this has a decent- sized body count offed in a wide variety of manners is a nice point for it as this one does manage some rather intriguing ideas here with such a lot of deaths to feature. That manages to include the fact that there are a couple of highly-enjoyable stalking scenes here to generate that amount of kills, from the opening home invasion which results in the murder of the family before his eventual arrest, the escape from the sanitarium that includes some decent antics against the staff to get out and the scenes of him lurking in the surrounding woods makes for some decent enough stalking scenes. Things pick up nicely in the finale when he targets them in the lodge which has some better-than-expected confrontations and has solid enough action to keep it interesting in the big showdown using the atmospheric mountain lodge setting to fine effect throughout here in letting the action develop nicely. These issues here really help this one, although the flaws here really outweigh these.
Overview: **/5
While this is nowhere near the top of the genre when it comes to the 'Santa slasher' subgenre, there's a few decent exploits within this one that make it watchable even with a multitude of flaws. Give this a shot if you're a completionist for this particular style of film or looking to round out the subgenre's films, while those who are less forgiving of the many flaws present should move on to other genre entries altogether.
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