When you slap together 3 indie films and call it a Christmas horror flick…

…you get Santa’s Sickest: Tales of Terror, Torture, Murder and Gore! Sure there’s an evil Santa on the DVD case. Sure, the blurb on the back reads:

“…when Santa goes off the deep end and decides it’s time to exact revenge on spoiled brats and forces that impede his agenda, look out because the carnage is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Welcome to Santa’s Sickest, a no holds barred, holiday head bashing anthology like no other to put under that special someone’s tree this year. A Slashing, Slaying, Mutilating, Dismembering Yule tide tribute to old Saint Nick!”

Unfortunately, if you’ve been sold on all that, you’ve been bamboozled. There is no Santa (Not on this DVD, There is in real life). There isn’t a single Christmas themed story here. What we actually have is a DVD that includes three completely unrelated full-length indie movies, each running about an hour and fifteen minutes long. They are not part of a horror anthology with a wraparound. You simply get a menu that allows you to choose from one of the three movies. I’m sure it’s a great way to inexpensively get all three of these films out on DVD, but there seems to be a segment of indie horror filmmakers that thinks the best way to get people to see and appreciate their films is to totally mislead and mismarket. And I’ve witnessed it backfire again and again.

But I’ll overlook that issue and take each movie for what it’s worth.

Sloppy the Psychotic

Clown horror! Really low-budget, shot-on-video clown horror. Some dude named Sloppy is a total failure as a clown. When he gets fired, he boozes it up (should have been called Boozo the clown) and goes around hacking up raunchy, nasty white trash.

Nothing scary here, but I love that the film just totally goes for the sex and gore exploitation. At a pool party, one guy sucks on a girl’s big tit while her hand is down his pants and she’s jerking him off vigorously. Another dude gets a blowjob that would not sit well with the ratings system; we get to see his pubes and she grabs and kneads his ass voraciously. We also see his cock as a shadow puppet on the wall when she pulls away for some air (awesome). And then…Sloppy rams a big decorative candy cane in his ass and it pops out the back of her head.

We also get a drag queen prostitute and a dude jerking off to porn. Sloppy comes and hacks of the head of the guy’s dick, we get to see all the gory, gushing aftermath (the guy is huge even with the head cut off), and Sloppy makes the dude give his head some head. Ew.

The tastelessness continues, including some slaughter of mentally handicapped people and finally…Sloppy crams a kid into a barbecue and closes the lid! Delicious.

The Experiment

Running only an hour along, The Experiment goes into much darker territory. A stripper’s life takes a downturn so she agrees to be part of an experiment with a drug that enhances female libido. It all begins with an incredibly violating scene in which the “doctor” examines every part of her.

When she takes the drug, things start getting trippy and even more disturbing. But the movie ends up turning into a softcore masturbation video—and this is after we’ve already gotten a whole lot of footage of the stripper dancing at the club (to a really great instrumental rock song at one point). She spends the second half of the movie writhing around and feeling herself up, so it kind of waters down (and moistens) the point of the plot. The cryptic conclusion involves her having flashbacks about what may actually have happened while she was drugged up.

There is a subliminal message embedded in the quick cuts showing her flashbacks, so naturally, I freeze-framed to see if I was going to end up involuntarily rubbing my va-jay-jay raw later on. But it was merely an ad for the test drug she was taking.

IBS: Irritable Bowel Syndrome

If you’re thinking this is going to be some nasty, low-budget film loaded with shit humor and repulsive visuals…you’re right. But I have to admit, this was actually my favorite film on this disc! It’s really worthy of being a Troma release.

The story is simple. There’s this dude. He has IBS. We get to see how it affects and is ruining his whole life: work, dating, and every other minute of his existence. He even passes up a chance to play strip poker when his roommate invites a bunch of girls over.

Aside from explicitly and graphically showing us what happens in IBS dude’s bathroom every day—which may cause the queasy to have some irritable bowel issues of their own—this crappy little movie still manages to demonstrate the silent suffering of people with chronic health problems and how it can completely cripple their lives.

But of course, this being a horror movie about a guy who can’t stop shitting himself, there’s got to be a twist. When an office bully at work humiliates IBS dude one time too many, he strikes back…and accidentally kills the bully. And it does wonders for his digestive system.

There’s some over-the-top, Troma-esque moments, including a dildo fight with a homeless man and an encounter with an unfortunate cat during a bathroom bout. And this soon leads to plenty of farcical, comic, campy, gory montages of IBS dude committing some very inventive murders. There’s even a leather daddy hogtied on a bed!

But the ultimate moment has to be when a muscle stud convinces a chick to let him do her up the ass (after she repeatedly calls it faggot sex). He soon learns what it feels like to be on the receiving end, because IBS dude comes in and, well, fucks him with a chainsaw! Awesome.

However, I definitely think IBS dude’s roommate steals the show when he discovers what’s been going on..

After a major massacre at a party, the final scene is actually a really anticlimactic letdown. I think if Troma had picked up this film for distribution, they would have left everything before it untouched but insisted on a more crap-tastic ending.