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. Writer/director Begos burst onto the horror scene with the shot-for-nearly-nothing alien flick Almost Human (2013) and has since made a name for himself with down-and-dirty, scumbag horror that thrives on blood, guts, and neon. His films tend to feature characters struggling in the margins: metalheads, veterans, artists, or psychics, who drown their issues in booze and drugs until they run straight into unfortunate (and usually incredibly gory) situations.

Christmas Bloody Christmas follows Tori (a fantastic Riley Dandy, who also appeared in the definitively not horror holiday outing Hollywood Christmas the same year), a record-store owner who just wants to get wasted and have a one-night stand, but employee Robbie (Sam Delich) instead convinces her to party with him. So Tori and Robbie lock up the store and stumble out into the night to drink, drop f-bombs, and circle around the growing chemistry between them. At the same time, a robotic toy-store Santa glitches out and reverts to its military programming and begins carving a swath of destruction through the unnamed, generic small town on Christmas Eve.

In typical Begos fashion, things have gone quickly awry, and Tori and Robbie must fight for their lives as the Santa robot stomps, slashes, and axes its way through their neighbors and friends. The film is kinetic, colorful, and marvelously gory, with a ton of goopy practical effects (including a staircase head-stomp that made me a little queasy). Its great cast includes cameos from indie genre regulars like Jeremy Gardner (The Battery) and Jeff Daniel Phillips (a handful of films by Rob Zombie, another kingpin of scumbag horror), and menacing work from ER alum Abraham Benrubi as the seriously unstoppable killer Santa.

And that is pretty much it—Christmas Bloody Christmas is basically Silent Night, Deadly Night meets The Terminator, and it wears this on its blood-soaked sleeve. It’s a surprisingly winning combination, and once the action kicks off, it mostly remains propulsive fun. If you don’t happen to vibe with Begos’s aesthetic, you might bounce hard off of this movie, but for those with a soft spot for these ’80s-style plots and characters, it is a rocking film, lean and mean at 87 minutes, to watch with friends while drinking spiked eggnog.