For the fourth year running, here are some reviews of Christmas/holiday themed movies to inspire some seasonal watching.
Her friend Sophie (Honorine Magnier) gifts her a wooden box from Germany, a handcrafted advent calendar with 'the miracle of Christmas' written on the front, 'Dump it and I'll kill you' on the back, and a set of rules governing its use. Each of the locked doors must be opened at midnight, with a sharp rebuke from the box if Eva doesn't comply. Inside the box a trickster demon lurks, just waiting for the latest player to open door number one.
Some of the boxes contain chocolates, others objects or messages like "to cure hurt, destroy what hurt you" and "Jesus said to the cripple, get up and walk". Eva gradually understands that the box is exerting a force on her which allows her to control her environment. When she influences a rapey trader guy to die in a car crash, following a disastrous double date with Sophie and her latest beau, she also gets him to send a link to his phone stock market app, which immediately starts bringing in the Euros for her. But Eva also realises the Advent Calendar might have a higher, and deadlier purpose; to help her walk again.
Ridremont's modern fairy tale follows the 'be careful what you wish for' moral of Jacobs' 'The Monkey's Paw' story but the logic is skewed; Roussel is offered a miracle at huge cost, and it's the realisation that her dream of walking again could be realised, and the human cost of that dream, that turns her from an angry and embittered woman into something much darker.
For my taste The Advent Calendar is a little too tricksy to satisfy, but there's no doubting that it's a clever, uncomfortable film and Derouand turns in a fine, anguished performance which grows darker - and richer - as the film progresses.
When a bat flies into a window of the cabin one night, Olivia is minded to rescue the thing from the snow and restore it to health. Leaving it overnight in the garage, the following morning she is surprised but more than a little delighted to see that the bat, which was actually of the vampire variety, has changed back to naked male form in the rather buff shape of Luke (Nico Bellamy).
But when Julius King (Vernon Wells), a private investigator, turns up at the cabin, he’s in search of three vicious vampires, of which Luke is the most dangerous. Olivia finds it hard to reconcile the rather friendly guy she has in her garage with the concept of a murderous bloodsucker, but when Luke’s friends Jackie (Laura Kennon) and Brock (Alan Silva) turn up, she sees a different side of the vampire she thought was going to be useful in helping fine tune the details of her novel.
Red Snow is a comedy that raises smiles rather than belly laughs, and if you don’t warm to the kooky Olivia you may find it hard work. But it’s well cast and the snowy scenery is a bonus. There are some great lines (Luke describes the movie Nosferatu as the Birth of a Nation for his kind, and likens the pigs blood procured for him, rather than the human plasma he requires, as the difference between “craft beer and warm piss”): it’s also surprisingly gory and the effects are good for something that was probably pretty small budget wise. And Timothy Lynch’s soundtrack does a lovely job of sinistering up some Christmas standards; honestly you’ve never heard ‘The Coventry Carol’ sound more chilling.
As a child young Jamie, a horror movie obsessed little boy, has a tough time. Losing his mother to cancer, he’s now caught in the middle of heightened bickering between dad and his new wife, with only a bright pink puppet (a favourite of his mother’s) for company. Bickering has escalated to separation status, and as Jamie’s stepmother makes arrangements to leave the family home, she is knifed to death by an invisible assailant; the body is whisked away and she is deemed to have gone missing.
Ten years later Jamie, now a young student (and in audacious bit of casting, his part is played, not by a teenager, but 50 year old Aleks Paunovic, possibly a nod to all those teen slasher movies where the students are actors in their 20s and 30s) has gathered his schoolfriends together for a weekend at the home where he grew up, now abandoned.
Once they arrived the gang settle in for the usual blend of beer, drugs and pre marital sex, with Jamie more keen to access a stash of VHS tapes in the basement and organise a horrorthon. But the movies aren’t the only thing from the past that’s rediscovered. His pink puppet is also unearthed, and before long somebody, or something, is offing the partying kids.
You have to take a pretty big leap of faith to go with the plotting of this frequently hilarious homage to/send up of classic horror movies. But it wins because the script is smart, the cast are great value, and the puppet gets all the best lines. It’s often pretty gory too; the addition of filmmakers Jen and Sylvia Soskia about half way through, in a plot device which intrigues rather than annoys, displays not only their acting chops but a film which isn’t afraid to chuck everything into the mix. Good work.
Over at We Love Toys store manager Jonathan Wexler (a bowtie and cardigan sporting Bruce Campbell) is preparing his workers for the busiest night of the year. The staff include Ken (Devon Sawa), who is pissed that he has to work on the night of the holiday while his kids get to have a slap up Thanksgiving dinner at home with his ex-wife and her lame boyfriend; tough final girl in waiting Marnie (Ivana Baquero), with whom Ken is having a bit of a thing despite being twenty years older than her; cleanliness freak Chris (Ryan Lee); employee of the month Anita (Celeste Olivier); and uber bossy bitchy team leader Brian (Stephen Peck).
But this shopping event is going to be rather different. In a neighbouring warehouse a gigantic blob, presumably alien but unexplained, overcomes and mutates some of the workers there. And by the time We Love Toys is open for business the whole district has been overwhelmed with infected shoppers. And they’re headed for Jonathan and his team.
“There’s something wrong with the shoppers” remarks a character at one point, which is probably the understatement of the year. Director Casey Tebo (who seems to have cut his teeth directing Aerosmith promotional videos) has great fun pitching the mutated hordes (well twenty or so of them anyway, the budget’s pretty slim) against the disparate and disgruntled staff of the toy store, who predictably overcome their differences, utilising pretty much anything in the store in the fight against the infected townsfolk.
The practical effects are the star here, a homage to DTV 1980s latex FX classics (and the Dawn of the Dead nods are clear and present), and if the script and overall narrative are sometimes a bit scrappy and inconclusive, the film is saved by some dry performances and an increasing sense of mayhem, building to an impressively fiery climax.
Silent Night feels a bit like Richard Curtis remaking Lars von Trier's 2011 movie Melancholia. There's an off feeling about the whole thing (and not in a bad way), which gradually transforms into full on pathos. The disclosure of secrets among the group, which in any other film would be the dramatic climax, here occurs half way through the movie but becomes inconsequential; these people have bigger concerns than human frailty. And while the details behind the catastrophe are only hinted at, one character opines: "We should have voted Green..fucking Conservatives".