A fun Christmas film for the whole family. Opening with
a slow-mo shopping scene that humorously reflects the true capitalist nature of
the holiday, the black humor infusing much of the first third of the movie lessens
a bit after Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen of The
Beach Bum [2019 / trailer]), the "nice" daughter of the
middle-class half of the disharmonious extended family, meets her fate
off-screen with a scream. Thereafter, the laughs might be rarer but for that
the bodycount increases. Indeed, Krampus proves himself an equal-opportunity
anti-Christmas demon, as happy to take Democrats as Republicans — not to
mention a few innocent souls that have nothing to do with the family whose
unhappy son, Max (Emjay Anthony of Incarnate
[2016 / trailer]), accidentally calls up the anti-Santa:
aside from Beth's boyfriend and his family, other known unrelated (off-screen) fatalities
include a package delivery guy and a snowplow driver. More notable: unlike in
most films, even babies aren't safe in Krampus
— but then, why should they be?
The focus of the film, however, is on the Engels &
Last-Name-Never-Given families, two groups tied by respective the
mothers/sisters (the always excellent Toni Colette as upper middle class mom Sarah
and the highly promising Allison Tolman as deplorable way lower middle
class mom Linda), that probably never gather but for every Christmas or Thanksgiving
and afterwards always wonder "Why?" (In other words, families like
yours and ours.) The question is less will they or won't they survive the night
than who goes next, but when you're fighting a powerful creature with numerous
nasty henchmen — demon toys and killer gingerbread men and monster elves — what
else is to be expected?
The tale has some flaws and holes to it, ranging from
small to large, but they're easy to overlook once the big bad snowstorm hits
town and the rest of the world seems to disappear. (The tiniest quibble we had
is the bonding scene between the two sisters, where there is an exchange about
an X-mass tree ornament that would hardly be a surprise for Linda if the families
get together every year. Thus the scene, for all its bonding intentions, felt
hollow.) As in all bodycounters, characters tend to do a lot of stupid things
considering the threat they face, and Krampus's reach is oddly expansive for
him to remain so unknown to the world of the movie (especially if he harvests
everyone, and not just those who accidentally "call" him). But then,
the flick does play in a world where there is no such thing as Santa but a such
thing as an anti-Santa…
Krampus is never truly scary, and hardly all that
bloody, but the body count is large and the harvest continuous. There are scenes
that give you a mild scare or make you jump, not to mention a decent laugh or
more along the way, and the movie in no way looks cheaply made nor is it badly
acted. Indeed, one actually begins to identify with many of the characters,
including those one normally might not. (Each kid that died, though, was a
death to cheer.) And the mid-film flashback done in the style of a stop-motion
film is an unexpected visual treat, not to mention a nice way to work in an
explanation of who or what Krampus is (he is, after all, a legendary creature
that never made it stateside and that has only relatively recently reemerged in
Europe). It is also the first American film we have seen in a long time to have
a real German-speaking person (speaking real German) playing a character of
German decent (Krista Stadler as Omi Engel), which is a plus point in our book.
On the whole, Krampus
is a worthy successor to director Michael Dougherty's other holiday horror film,
the unjustly unknown directorial debut, Trick 'R
Treat (2008),
which nevertheless is definitely also the better movie of the two.Gorehounds and trash aficiandos will probably
come away a bit less than satisfied with Krampus, but anyone looking for a well-made and
entertaining Christmas horror film that doesn't drag or overstay its welcome
and only falls mildly apart at the end — where we the only ones to be reminded
of the ending of the original Nightmareon Elm Street (1984 / trailer)? — will find Krampus
the perfect movie to screen after the annual viewing of It's A Wonderful Life (1946 / trailer).
Another year has gone by and once again t'is the season to be
jolly and celebrate uncontrolled, pointless consumerism with people who get on
your nerves around a dying or plastic tree decorated with tacky things… And also the
season for our yearly Christmas short, a short chosen (as done [almost] every December) with
the Christmas spirit in mind. This year, a 23-second quickie complete with money shot entitled
Oh, Christmas Tree, created by some 6' 1" (1.85 m) guy
named Ted Bracewell, who no longer seems to have a website ("Site
Suspended"). And while we don't exactly know when he made his short, it has
been available at his equally stagnate YouTubepresence since 2015. ("I'm
working on new stuff. I apologize it's taken forever, but I promise this channel
is not dead! Thank you and God bless! — Ted") Oh, Christmas Tree was originally
created for Eli Roth's, The Crypt, your
favorite semi-unknown online source for internet horror. Enjoy… and then check
out our Christmas shorts of the past, listed and linked further below. (And maybe even go over to YouTube to enjoy Bruce Blain's Mad Santa.)
(Spoilers.) A rare movie which,
at least when it was originally released, had its cake and ate it, too — but
the subsequent evolution into a franchise has pretty much negated, in
retrospect, the [violent but oddly bloodless] movie's social criticism and
supposed anti-violence message. The tale centers around a happily married,
well-to-do, neo-liberal couple with two kids who live in a vomit-inducing
McMansion-hell suburb in "New America", an Un-united States of the
future that pretty much reflects the neo-fascist attitude of today's totalitarian-minded
Republicans. (Note: "You are either with us or against us" is not an
attitude that is conducive to a working democracy.)
Trailer to
The Purge:
Do we really have to mention that
in the future today of the franchise (and this, its first film), for one
12-hour period a year murder and total lawlessness is legal? In The Purge, when some defenseless and
bloodied low-income black man (Edwin Hodge of All the Boys Love Mandy Lane [2009 / trailer]) screaming for
help stumbles into the neighborhood where safety-systems salesman James Sandin
(Ethan Hawk of Daybreakers
[2009) lives with his beautiful stay-home wife Mary Sandin (Lena Headey of Dredd [2012 / trailer] and, of course,
The Game of Thrones [2011-19], seen belwo from GQ and not the movie) and
kids live, their still-idealistic young son Charlie (Max Burkholder) gives him refuge.
Not smart, as angering the entitled Proud Boys and Girls of America is
definitely a mistake: they aren't wimps when they know they can get away with
it. (Really, though: is killing your girlfriend's dad a viable way to win her
hand and get in her panties?)
Anyway, first comes the concept
of "save our own skin", then that of "what have we
become?", and finally the desperation of the pure survival mode — but all
of it transpires in a fashion far more intriguing and involving than one would
expect. A surprisingly effective and affective movie.
While putting together the blog entry Babes
of Yesteryear: Uschi Digard, Part VII: 1973-74, we stumbled upon the
name David Grant, aka Terry Gould. It was under that latter name that he
directed a "documentary" that Uschi did not appear in, entitled Sex, Love and Marriage (1972, poster
below). A name unknown outside of Great Britain, where he has possibly also been
more or less forgotten, Grant seems to have been what one would call a
personality.*
After discovering his fun, 1972 "X-rated"
short Snow White and the Seven
Perverts (go to Part
VII to see it),** we decided to look for another of the numerous
"pornographic" animated shorts he distributed around that time, a
short with the inviting title Woman's Best Friend. A Bob Godfrey*** (27 Jan
1921 – 21 Feb 2013) production, the wordless, roughly 5-minute-long short was directed and
animated and we assume "written" by "Mane", otherwise known
as the Italian animator Bernardino "Dino" Manetta (20 Apr 1947
– 5 Nov 2018).
The narrative of Woman's Best Friend is less written
than strung together, as it tells no real tale and instead simply presents a
continual series of visual jokes all centered around the penis, which, probably,
is far more the man's best friend than it is the woman's — men do, in any
event, obsess about dick a lot more than woman do. The extremely simplified drawing
style is very much that of Manetta, while the extremely puerile humor is, in
our opinion, typical of youths (and many men) and somewhat dated. For all the
erections shown, it is far less pornographic than it is childish. And there-in lies
the short's appeal: for all its obsession with sex and man's third leg, it is ever
so oddly naïve and innocent. Amazingly enough, when the short was made, it was refused classification by the British censor and therefore effectively
banned.
Short Film —
Woman's Best Friend (1975):
And just to keep up with the penis theme of this
month's Short Film of the Month,
here's a fact you may not have known: Gay men have bigger wieners than straight
men [NCBI]. And
sorry, straight guys, size
matters.
*Per Wikipedia
(accessed 29.11.19): "David Hamilton Grant (born Willis Andrew
Holt; 1939–1991) was an English porn producer, and suspected child
pornographer during the late 1960s and 1970s. […] David Grant's first film was Love Variations (1969), a sex education
film that was based on a 'marriage manual' Grant had photographed/published a
year earlier. Grant's sex film empire grew in the 1970s, he opened up a number
of adult cinemas […] distributed foreign sex films […], and produced his […]
British sex comedies (Girls Come First [1975 / NSFW], The
Office Party [1976], Under the Bed [1977]). […] Described
in a 1978 profile in Punch magazine
as 'a chubby, boyish forty-year-old, with a youthful, uncorrupted face enfolded
in two glossy skull-caps of hair and beard', Grant liked to refer to himself as
the 'King of Sexploitation', Grant enjoyed giving himself Hitchcock cameos in
his own films. […] In the early eighties, Grant turned to video, forming the
World of Video 2000 label with fellow 1970s sex film mogul Malcolm Fancey. […]
In 1983 Grant noted that Steven Spielberg's film E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982
/ trailer) had yet
to be released on home video in the UK, and responded by releasing an old
sixties 'B' movie called Night Fright (1968 / PD film) on video
under the title E.T.N — The Extra Terrestrial Nastie, with video artwork
that parodied the E.T poster. […] On 3 February 1984, Grant was imprisoned for
distributing 'video nasty' Nightmares in a Damaged Brain
(1981 / trailer) on
video. Grant was sentenced to 6 months in prison […]. […] A resident of Turkish
Cyprus for most of the 1980s, he left the island under a dark cloud in 1988,
following a street brawl with a love rival. The Sun newspaper reported Grant 'battered Briton Clive Godden, his
girlfriend's husband, on the head with a spade, causing serious injuries'. Both
The Sun and the Slough Observer also alleged that Grant had been a drug dealer, and
had also 'corrupted thousands of children' during his time in Northern Cyprus,
but in The Sun piece Neil Syson
reported that the Cyprus police had no solid proof to support these
allegations. He died in 1991, believed to have been victim of a contract
killing."
**Per Letterboxd:
"Animation, Short, Comedy Granted an 'X' Certificate (adults only) by the
British Board of Film Censors. The animators and writers initially chose to
remain anonymous. However, veteran British cell animator and rostrum cameraman
Marcus Parker-Rhodes (Picnic on Imbrium Beach[1983])
has come forward to claim that this cartoon is 'mostly my work.' He also
credits Stan Hayward as the writer." One should perhaps keep in mind
that in GB, Hammer horror films were also often given an X rating, so the X
hardly carries the weight that a US X-rating does.
***Here, as an extra, is another root-obsessed semi-length animated film
for your visual pleasure, Bob Godfrey's Wicked
Willie (1990):
