Krampus: Origins

Krampus Origins (2018) is a movie that I recently watched on Tubi. The storyline takes place shortly after World War I when a military officer finds an artifact and is killed shortly after. The artifact is sent to his widow who happens to run an orphanage. When the kids at the orphanage accidentally summon Krampus, the widow and orphans will have to try and stop him.

This movie is directed by Joseph Mbah (Battlefield 2025) and stars Maria Olsen (Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief), Anna Harr (Hot Seat), Amelia Haberman (The Covenant, 2017), Katie Peabody (Lear's Shadow) and Dustin James Leighton (Exit to Hell).

This is not a good movie. The attire and settings are okay, but the acting and dialogue is very average. The plot drags and doesn't have enough horror scenes; but when they do have horror sequences, they are average and disappointing. Even the background horror music is average and Krampus doesn't look like the cover.

Overall, this is a movie that gets stale fast and stays there. I would score this a 2/10 and recommend skipping it.

Acting for most part was decent. Ambiance was not very believable as 1913 even though the tried. Very drawn out in the beginning but it was better than when we saw the monster. I refuse to call it Krampus. I dont know what it was supposed to be. I sat through over an hour (it seemed) of nothing but dialog that was questionable at times, for EVERY SINGLE death was done OFFSCREEN! Yea. Zero Krampus death scenes, unbelievable period piece and the absolute worst Krampus design. The Krampus dialog gave secondhand embarrassment for sure and the story didn't even line up with the legend. Had promise.

I actually liked the new take on Krampus as more of a human entity, and enjoyed the fact it wasn't just a slasher. Even though it was low budget they managed to cast a couple of decent actors with some credits behind them (Maria Olsen and Anna Harr). The rest of the actors ranged from adequate, to over the top bad. The bad consisted of actors trying to pull off dialects and accents that were beyond their ability, to the supremely annoying and over acted stuttering character of Bram. To sum it up worth a watch if you don't expect too much given the budget, also if you're a gore fan you will definitely be disappointed.

Apparently the makers of this film only looked at the cover of a "Krampus: for dummies" book. The movie is extremely slow and must have had a 2k budget, but what really made this a 1 star review, is they only made a movie about an ancient demon with horns that hates kids and they mentioned twice it happened to be Christmas. They don't seem to know what Krampus is at all.

Making this a period piece was really ambitious and its take on the Krampus story is certainly creative but it ultimately falls flat and becomes a shore to get through because of its flawed execution.

Decent production values and cinematography for what it is but lacking on almost every other aspect including the writing, pacing and directing.