Christmas Bloody Christmas
Director: Joe Begos
Release year: 2022
A grimy, low budget, fun-but-annoying mashup of Terminator, every sleazy slasher ever, a hangout movie, Texas Chain Saw Massacre and… First Blood? I don’t want to criticise too hard because it’s clearly a labour love made with no money and some ingenious effects to bridge the funding gap.
Tori runs a record/video store in a small Californian town. It’s Christmas Eve, it’s snowing, and she has a Tinder date lined up. Her clerk employee Robbie convinces her to spend the night getting drunk with him instead. Neither of them have accounted for the malfunctioning military-grade RoboSanta that is at the local toy store, and when they meet friends there after hours for a festive drink, the robot sets its sights on killing them all.
The first thirty minutes is an improvised hangout movie, and the banter between Tori and Robbie, which is natural and fun to a point, tips into annoying and expletive-laden posturing, so that when the killer RoboSanta arrives it’s a relief they stop talking. An unexpectedly disturbing sequence where the couple have sex while the robot slaughters the family next door, with the edit cutting back and forth, is a particularly odd choice.
There’s a police ex-boyfriend, a joke about pegging, real explosions, Tori screams a great deal, the robot just won’t die, etc, etc. It was clearly made with a ton of love and enthusiasm and about $10,000.