It’s a trio of holiday horror flicks that have already hit the streaming services for this seaosn, and I’ll be adding them all to the holiday horror pageholiday horror page, so let’s get right into them.
IT’S A WONDERFUL KNIFE (2023)
The director of Tragedy Girls and Good Boy tackles the trendy subgenre of time travel slashers framed as a play on It’s a Wonderful Life. This festive flick delivers Christmas atmosphere and violent kills by a cool killer all in white, plus it’s all wrapped up in a charming lesbian love story.
Justin Long plays the greedy mogul trying to basically take over an entire little town. Joel McHale plays a fellow real estate agent, and he has a daughter (the main girl), and a gay son (who scores a gay kiss, landing this one on the does the gay guy die? pagedoes the gay guy die? page).
A highlight of the film is Katharine Isabelle in a very different role as the cool lesbian aunt, and her girlfriend is the psycho girl from Influencer.
Within the first fifteen minutes of the film there are multiple kills, mostly at a Christmas party, and our main girl saves the day. But a year later she is still suffering from PTSD and wishes she was never born.
Bring on the It’s a Wonderful Life angle. Our main girl ends up in an alternate version of her town a year later, when she didn’t exist to stop the killer. The murders have continued, and now it’s up to her to unmask the killer and figure out how to get back to her original reality.
Things get a little wonky in the final act—it almost feels like a new concept is introduced at the last second, but overall it’s a fun ride with a lot of heart…and a lot of kills. Yay!
THE MEAN ONE (2022)
This film barely started and I knew it was an instant buy on Blu-ray for me. A gory slasher with violent kills, loads of Christmas spirit, and humor, it so perfectly pays homage to How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
The narrator speaks in rhyme, occasionally incorporating lines from the source material, and the film has plenty of Grinch references imbedded in both dialogue and the surroundings.
When our main girl Cindy was a child, she witnessed a horrorific murder on Christmas Eve. 20 years later she’s returning home with her dad to sell the house in Newville, a town that has completely stopped celebrating the season.
Cindy has a reputation for having claimed a green monster killed her mother, and even spent time in a mental institution. It’s no surprise that as soon as she returns home, people start dying and she begins claiming the green monster has returned.
And he has. The dude who plays Terrifier plays The Mean One with a perfect balance of sinister and silly.
He shines most during a major massacre at a bar.
And of course there’s the final fight to the death, which delivers a horror twist on the conclusion to the original classic Grinch story. This is an instant annual watch for me.
BLACK SANTA (2023)
This indie flick is touted as a horror movie on IMDb because it involves a guy in a Santa suit keeping all the people who made his childhood miserable tied to chairs with an array of torture weapons on a tray nearby, but the first major kill doesn’t happen until 75 minutes into this 83-minute movie.
More a commentary on the struggles of Black men in society, this is basically a no budget portrait of a Black kid who had it hard as a child and has finally snapped as a result. He lost his father, was abandoned by his druggy mother, was bullied, went into the foster system, saw his brother die at the hands of a doctor…all of which is revealed in endless flashbacks.
The scenes with the tied up victims are all the same, with Black Santa threatening to kill them violently and them all begging for their lives.
Honestly, the highlight for me was when our hunky killer gets shirtless at around the 23-minute mark.
I’m glad we have him to look at for 83 minutes, because there’s just not enough substance here to sink your teeth into, and not enough killing to satisfy your holiday horror itch.
