Argh! After Hellions, that abortion of an anti-abortion movie disguised as Halloween horror, I was kind of devastated to learn that two of my favorite things – Christmas horror and Dee Wallace – were going to be subjected to the same subject.
The difference here is, Red Christmas doesn’t try to disguise the theme of abortion, instead shoving it in our face, even scoring the intro credits with sound bites and clips of the social impact of the issue on society.
The film focuses on Dee’s family coming for the holidays. Her husband has passed, but she has a bunch of kids important to the issue at hand: a son with Down syndrome, a pregnant daughter, and a daughter that can’t get pregnant (while she blames herself for her infertility, chances are the real reason for her problem is that her reverend husband is a closet case with the hots for her sister’s husband…).
And heading for their house is a robed, bandage figure that can barely speak beyond mournfully crying out for his mother. As creepy as he is in his garb, when he arrives at the family’s door, Dee lets him in. And then…he drops the “a” bomb. Dee flips her lid and kicks him out.
He then spends the rest of the movie delivering a bloody good time for all, hacking and slashing this family to pieces: genitals are removed by hand, bodies are sliced in two, and everything from a bear trap to an umbrella to a blender comes into play.
And while everyone is running around screaming, drenched in the eerie Argento glow of Christmas lights as they do all the wrong things, Dee Wallace is at the top of her horror game, taking on the main girl role like she’s 20, even launching herself onto the killer (after a freaky mask-removal reveal) and into the Christmas tree in the film’s campiest moment. Abortions or not, it’s just more fun than Hellions.
It’s very easy to see Red Christmas as an all-out assault on female reproductive rights. The agenda seems to be to get viewers to sympathize with aborted fetuses by having one essentially come back from the dead, desperately seeking love and validation…then getting revenge on all the evil pro-choicers.
Those who suffer most? The ones who make the choice to abort a life that just wanted a home, a family, and a mother…especially at Christmas.
There are some arguments here supporting the need for abortion under certain circumstances…which are then negated by the introduction of a deeper moral implication of selfishly choosing to abort a pregnancy that might present personal challenges.
However, there really is some satisfaction for those of us who relish little brats dying in a horror movie (just as long as the dog lives) and want this walking abortion to go to hell. In the end, everyone from nurturing mothers to pervy closeted holy men are more than happy to send a clear message to a lost, desperate, heartbroken aborted fetus longing for acceptance: “Die, you repulsive fucker! You were never wanted here and should have stayed dead the first time!”
Okay, I give up. This really is inevitably a total right wing propaganda film. I’m just kind of disappointed there wasn’t a scene of someone attacking the killer with a coat hanger. Oh, come on. You know that shit would’ve made your unaborted ass laugh. For major hanger action, you’ll have to watch Hanger…a film about an aborted fetus that comes back for revenge…
The film is now available from Artsploitation Films. And the hairy beary director? Not sure if he’s available…
Now, just for getting through that blog, you’ve earned your wings! I mean…your bonus red Christmas. It’s another film with the same title!
Before there was the much-hyped Red Christmas starring Dee Wallace, there was the 60-minute mockumentary torture porn Red Christmas from Steve Rudzinski, director of Everyone Must Die!
Red Christmas is nothing like Rudzinski’s low budget indie slasher. In the tradition of darkly “humorous” serial killer films like The Last Horror Movie, the killer speaks directly to the camera and takes viewers on a journey into her mind and methods of killing.
Actress Amie Wrenn delivers a bubbly performance reminiscent of Lea Michele’s Rachel as she “gleefully” mutilates a young man she lures to her house with the promise of sex.
She ties him to a chair then begins performing all kinds of gruesome, non-CGI torture techniques on him: plucks off his finger nails one by one; gives him paper cuts; water boards him with eggnog; saws off his leg; does something so heinous to his eye I couldn’t even look.
In between torturing him and chatting with him about the holidays, she takes some time to go into the bathroom alone for confessional clips. This is when her “manic depressive” side comes out and we learn more about what makes her tick as a psycho.
It’s cool to see Rudzinski taking on a different horror subgenre and not holding back (seriously, he goes all the way with the morbidity by the end), even though this is definitely not my kind of movie.
But he did sort of put a Band-Aid on it for me, because the conclusion of the film has a twist that captures the spirit of his slasher humor perfectly. It could even spawn a spinoff movie.
