Why Hide?

Heading out to the countryside, a group of friends arrives a remote house to celebrate the holiday season, but as the night goes on the group suddenly comes to believe that a malevolent entity is preying on them using their darkest fears as fuel to kill them and must escape the house alive.

This was a fine if somewhat flawed effort. One of the better elements featured in this one is the strikingly enjoyable first half where there's some fun to be had with the build-up of the friends arriving at the house. This one treats the group rather nicely with how they're introduced as they seem like a genuine group of friends that would be hanging out together, poking fun and generally having fun while being together. The scenes of them partying together and having drinks while being out in the wilderness offers a fine starting point to where the horror elements that emerge later on have a rather intriguing base to work off of. When the horror does emerge here, there are some rather enjoyable times here as this one turns into a rather different animal than expected. The idea of being trapped in the house which suddenly starts in on the concept of the spirit getting free and turning their fears onto each other in the attempt to terrify them. These provide the kind of stellar supernaturally-tinged sequences that really could've added a lot more to this one than what's provided. Still, the idea of the relentless series of encounters that spring up as a result of their random encounters throughout the darkened house really drives this with some nice energy during the best part of the film. These here are what hold it up over the main flaws present. The main issue to be had with the film is a rather tonally chaotic final half that doesn't know what it wants to really do with itself. This one goes through a rather odd change-of-pace from the realistic setup of the first half by dropping the idea of them being at the house together and instead goes into a series of random occurrences that are due to to the sudden random appearance of this creature intent on killing them. The appearance of the creature is a complete mystery as to what it actually is, there's nothing about what it's trying to do at the house in the first place, making this part of the film incredibly confusing and disorienting. As well, the film has the rather odd sense of pacing within here that does manage to get progressively worse as the movie goes on. As it spends so long with the friends getting to know them that when it finally gets to the horror very little if anything has been said about what's going on because there's way too much of it about other areas. By then rushing through the actions of the ghostly creature with no information about what's happening really tends to undermine this by taking all the time it could've spent on building that to instead work this out. As well as an utterly moronic finale that doesn't do this any favors by preparing for an unwanted sequel, these here hold this one down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.

Just from the title i expected much more. The beginning was exiting but then it got lame. It became like every other horror stories. The plot was great but it felt like the director didn't know how to keep it going and just made it like that. The ending gave us nothing. It left place for so much improvement. Overall it wasn't that bad.

This is a mighty thin sliver of a holiday horror movie. It's set at Christmas, but its Christmasy part amounts to a group of friends getting drunk and modeling newly gifted underwear. And this is the movie's best sequence!

The rest is a sketchy, by-the-numbers mishmash of paganism, mean ghosts, and supernatural mind games, the confluence of which seems to have bored the writer, the director, and the cast. It didn't do much for me either.

I did like the chubby, cheese-making, shotgun-toting lesbian character. This role was well-written and the actress who played it seemed present when she came on screen. Everyone else seemed absent, as if their minds were elsewhere. Given this movie's uninspired plot, I can't much blame them.

All in all, despite having come all the way from the UK, this movie leaves little in its wake. It's as if it never fully arrived in the first place

Good movie to watch for especially the scenes are well made and horror is present in every scene the movie is a holiday horror but good to see.

"Why Hide?" or "Christmas Presence" is nothing more than your garden variety schlock horror film. The only original thing they did was make the characters all LGBT, but did absolutely nothing with it. The first act had a decent build, where it established the characters in a base line sense. The jokes are cringey and I think they may have implied the main character was a TERF, but nothing ever comes of it. Everything that followed got progressively worse. The antagonistic force in this is each characters worst fear. The group figures this out after a few incidents, but whenever they are targeted, they become oblivious again. The ending is a bad, confused twist, possibly to set up a sequel. Don't waste your time.