Director: Jason Hull
Year: 2014
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Following a rash of child abductions, a police officer with a connection to the killer from his own child abduction story learns that his perpetrator was none other than the evil Krampus who’s out carrying out his deeds for the year and tries to put aside his feud with an ex-convict to bring the demon down.
Review:
There wasn’t much to like with this one. Among the more enjoyable features here is the film’s general setup that clues him into the goings-on in the village. Based on the early abduction and escape he endured as a kid to have gotten away from the Krampus who tried to drown him in a river, the experience he has from that situation to drive him into changing his ways to become a cop that specializes in the missing kids' case that's taking place here is a fine move. It allows for a solid investigation angle in the first half with him and the other guys tracking down the missing children which is how they manage to track it down to the creek in the woods where they first encounter it. With the situation tying nicely into the guilt he experiences over what's going on with the public outcry over the incidents being reported which gives this a nice sense of guilt for the finale, these here are the only elements the work for this one.
There are quite a few issues here. The biggest problem is the fact that, for a film as short as this one is, it tends to take forever to get going as the pacing here is exceptionally slow-going. The exploits of the child-kidnapping demon that take center-stage, for the most part, are carried out at snail's pace speeds, rendering them far more comically ineffectual than anything else while the same could be said for the absolutely laughable confrontations with the creature. The police's encounter with the Krampus in the middle of the snowy woods is full of cringe-inducing action, from the slow-motion photography to try to impart a sense of grandeur to the situation to the agonizingly lame way the creature gets the advantage over them since they can't land a single hit to stop it but yet it can knock them out no problem to bring them back to its lair. These manage to hold up the running time quite severely.
That also leads to the other central problem where the main figure here is so underutilized that it's hard to remember how he ties into the story at all. The storyline for the film revolves around the Krampus coming after kids in the small-town for only a brief portion overall as the shift in priority to the escaped convict and his revenge motivation against the cop for locking him up rightfully for no reason. The home invasion plot that comes of this is so poorly handled and adds nothing of any interest to the film as a whole that it seems tacked on to add another star for the poster art but is otherwise unimportant due to keeping the Krampus off-screen for the duration of this section of the film, much like the brief plot about the other cops being upset about the dead officers on his watch that goes nowhere but eats up time to keep the figure hidden. Given how bad it looks anyway, that's a mixed blessing but still stands out, keeping this one down as well.
Overview: */5
A barely-there Krampus-styled creature feature that is bland, boring and doesn’t have a good lead villain makes this a sorely disappointing genre effort. Really only go into this one if you’re a hardcore holiday-based genre completist, while those that prefer anything with more substance than what’s on display here should heed extreme caution.
Comments
Post a Comment