CHRISTMAS EVIL
****
You can keep your Silent Nights, your Deadly Nights, and your Black Christmas’s; Santa Clause can visit those Martians until the cows come home, and the Governator can jingle all the damn way for all I care; because when the yuletide season rolls around there is only one perennial favorite I want stuffing my stocking. I am talking about none other than Lewis Jackson’s brilliant Christmas Evil, AKA You Better Watch Out, AKA Terror in Toyland… Aaaaw yeah. The Slasher Santa sleeper whose cult appeal seems to grow exponentially with the slicing of each year’s fruit cake.
But what, you might ask, makes Christmas Evil stand apart from the rest? What is so goddamned special about this psychopathic Santa Claus? Well my friends, the secret ingredient to Christmas Evil is pure and simple creative inventiveness. A rarity in the slasher sub-genre.
While cleverly exploring the seedier sides of the Santa Claus myth, Christmas Evil follows the gradual mental breakdown of factory worker and Christmas lover Harry. Harry has always had a problematic relationship to Christmas, ever since his attempted holiday suicide after catching his Mommy being eaten out by Santa Clause. Watch out Virginia, cunnilingus will drive you to KILL! But most of that seems behind him as he joyfully spreads shaving cream over his face thirty years later in his heavily decorated apartment. In spite of the ridiculousness of some of the scenes, this movie works simply because it allows us a window into the heart of a friendless lonely man working in a Kafka-esque bureaucratic system, desperate to hold onto some shred of innocence. It is innocence that drives him dress as Santa, and his naïve hope for goodwill that makes him spy on the local school children, compiling an extensive naughty and nice list. Brandon Maggart (real life father of Fiona Apple) turns an impressive performance as the man who slowly comes to believe that he IS Santa Claus. We are on his side throughout, which is what makes later scenes of violent indulgence that much harder to stomach.
At any given moment the film is defying easy genre classification by working on various levels: as cinematic eye candy (especially if you’re watching the Synapse video reprint of the film), as ridiculous B-movie excess, as a psychological thriller, as a legitimate holiday family comedy, and as a slow burn disturbing film. It’s the scenes of bizarre excess, the hilarious twist ending, the odd tongue in cheek sense of humor, and the brief bouts of gore that secures this film’s place in the pantheon of cult hits; it’s the brutal and haunting beauty of it’s characterization that allows it to linger in the brain long after its conclusion. In the age of remakes I wait for the Hollywood redux of this film. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.
- Jasper Oliver
January 20, 2010
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