Deadly Games aka Dial Code Santa Claus
Probably most famous for being considered the French—and more violent and traumatic—Home Alone (which came a year later), Deadly Games is a wild, visually inventive Christmas thriller that stands on its own.
Christmas Bloody Christmas
To me, the best killer Santa is the one played by Larry Drake in Robert Zemeckis’s 1989 Tales from the Crypt episode “And All Through the House,” but the robot Santa from Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022) gives him a run for his money.
Candyman
I first saw Candyman in high school, on a VHS from the local video store, where my friends and I rented three to five films every weekend to watch in the dorm on our prohibited TV/VCR combo hidden away in a closet.
Pulse
Pulse is, in my mind, the pinnacle of the J-horror wave in the late ’90s and early ’00s. It is part of Kurosawa’s early explorations into the apocalypse, which also include Cure (1997) and the criminally underseen Charisma (1999).
Razorback
I first saw Razorback as part of Joe Bob Briggs’s MonsterVision, which was one of my primary means of discovering new films beyond my small-town video store and Channel 11’s Saturday Afternoon Movies.
I Come in Peace
Part of the Channel 11 Saturday Afternoon Movies canon, I Come in Peace (released outside the U.S. as Dark Angel) is the third-best Al Leong Christmas movie (after Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, of course) and may have the most explosions of any Christmas movie ever.
Bedevilled
Hae-won (Ji Seong-won) works at a bank in Seoul, a hyper-competitive and male-dominated space that leaves her stressed and loath to get involved with others.
A Tale of Two Sisters
Two thousand and three was a weird year for Korean cinema. Hard on the heels of the paradigm shift of 1999-2001, domestic films managed to overtake Hollywood’s numbers at the box office.
The Boxer’s Omen
The Boxer’s Omen, Kuei Chih-hung’s second-to-last film, is absolutely unlike anything you’ve seen before.
The Last Winter
There is a deep sense of overwhelming sadness that pervades Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter. Oil workers for North Industries, run by Ed Pollack (the perfectly cast Ron Perlman), join forces with an environmental investigation team led by James Hoffman (James Le Gros) to study the viability of a new drilling site deep in the Alaskan wilderness.